What’s New in Australia
The Australia family release is here — and it's a packed one. Whether you're a platform owner trying to close compliance gaps, a security admin who wants better visibility into your instance, or an AI steward trying to make sure your agentic workflows run with the right guardrails, this release has something for you.
One customer put it simply when asked about AI adoption: "It comes down to three things: data, data, and data." The more AI does on this platform, the more critical it becomes to know what data it can reach, how that data is protected, and who's accountable when something goes wrong. The Australia release is about making those answers easier to give — and easier to prove.
Before we dive in: if you'd rather watch than read, the AI Platform Security team recorded a walkthrough of the Australia release, with live demos of several of the capabilities below. It's available on-demand. You can also review the complete AI Platform Security release notes for everything that shipped.
AI & Platform Security Foundational Updates
As always, we'll start with what's included with the platform — capabilities every ServiceNow customer can take advantage of today, no additional license required.
Granular Admin Roles — Broad admin access has always been a compliance liability: one role that grants everything is the opposite of least privilege. Australia introduces more than 188 new purpose-driven admin roles, each scoped to a specific task. You can now give your team exactly the access they need — nothing more, nothing less — designed to minimize disruption to existing workflows. It's the kind of separation of duties that audit frameworks have always required, and it's now available out of the box.
Integration Provider Registry — As your business grows, so does the number of integrations connecting external systems to your ServiceNow® instance — and keeping track of all of them gets harder. The new Integration Provider Registry, accessible through Machine Identity Console, gives you a centralized record for your inbound integrations — provider name, authentication type, and associated credentials. When your auditors ask what's connected to your instance, you'll have a documented answer ready.
Access Management Console — Security Center now includes an Access Management Console with Access Analyzer and Access Findings built in. Eight automated checks run every 24 hours to surface common access problems: inactive users who still hold roles, doorman accounts, empty ACLs, external users with access to classified data, and more. Finding these issues proactively — before an auditor does — is the whole point.
Hardening Risk Acceptance — Every security team has recommendations for hardening they can't implement for legitimate operational reasons. In Australia, Security Center lets you formally accept risk for those settings, document the reason, and have your hardening score update automatically to reflect the intentional exception. It's the difference between a gap that looks like negligence and one that looks like governance.
ServiceNow Vault and Domain Separation
Now let's look at what's new in the premium security products — ServiceNow Vault and Domain Separation.
ServiceNow Vault: Vault Console - Guided Protection for Custom Apps — Vault Console was introduced in the Zurich release as a central command center for everything Vault. In Australia, we extended its guided experience to custom applications. Select the tables from your custom app, and Vault Console scans them to identify fields that may contain sensitive data, classifies those fields, and recommends the right protections — encryption, anonymization, or authentication controls. Then it walks you through implementation, step by step, without requiring you to know the right settings or the right sequence. The result is a dashboard showing exactly what data you have, how it's classified, and what protections are in place — the kind of clear, documented answer your auditors will expect.
ServiceNow Vault: Now Assist for Vault — Australia brings a new wave of AI-powered capabilities to the Vault admin experience. Now Assist for Vault includes GenAI skills that let you generate data discovery regex patterns from plain-language prompts, surface who has access to encryption keys just by asking, and schedule discovery jobs without navigating through multiple configuration screens. Agentic workflows go a step further: the Field Encryption workflow automates end-to-end setup from key creation to policy configuration, and the Custom App Security workflow guides you through applying Vault-standard protections to any custom application. The goal is simple — instead of knowing where to click and what to configure, you tell the system what you need, and it gets you there. The skills listed below are new for Q1:
- Data Discovery job summarization
Retrieves and summarizes previously run Data Discovery job results, letting admins quickly review findings without manually searching through job logs
- Recommend column classifications
Recommends sensitivity labels by analyzing table and column metadata, reducing manual classification errors and helping ensure consistent governance at scale
ServiceNow Vault: Data Privacy - Real-Time Alerting and Blocking — Data Privacy now catches sensitive data — PII, account numbers, SSNs — before it enters the platform, not after. When a user tries to submit a field containing sensitive information, the system flags it immediately, explains what was detected, and can even block the submission until the data is removed. It works across the Classic UI, Service Catalog, Chat, and AI interactions. Catching it at the point of entry can mean less cleanup, less exposure, and fewer compliance incidents down the road. You can set up a real-time data prevention policy to match your environment.
ServiceNow Vault: Data Privacy - Attachment Quarantine — Uploaded files have always been a blind spot for sensitive data governance. In Australia, Data Privacy scans attachments for sensitive content in real time as they're uploaded and automatically quarantines any file that matches your discovery policies — restricting access until an admin reviews and either releases or removes it. The exposure window is now measured in seconds, not days.
ServiceNow Vault: Data Privacy - Condition-Based Anonymization — Anonymization jobs can now be triggered by configurable conditions aligned to your business operations, not just schedules. Set a weekly job to anonymize sensitive data in incidents once they reach a closed or resolved status, for example — automatically, without manual intervention. This supports the data minimization strategies required by regulations like GDPR, without touching records that are still actively being used. Watch a demo of condition-based anonymization to see it in action.
ServiceNow Vault: Platform Encryption - External Key Management for AWS — For enterprises that manage encryption keys across multiple systems, keeping ServiceNow keys on a separate lifecycle has created operational overhead. Australia introduces External Key Management Service (EKMS) support for AWS: you can now generate, rotate, and revoke ServiceNow encryption keys entirely within your own AWS KMS, on your organization's rotation schedule, alongside every other system you manage. One audit footprint. One key management policy, enterprise wide. AWS KMS is the first supported provider, with additional providers on the roadmap. Watch a demo of EKMS to see it configured.
Domain Separation Updates — Two improvements for customers running multi-tenant environments. The new Process Override Report gives domain admins a filterable view of process overrides impacted by platform upgrades, with side-by-side comparisons to promote or discard each change helping reduce problems. And a new Domain Visibility AI Agent Workflow lets you view, add, or remove visibility rules for a user through a plain-language interface — no scripts, no manual digging through configuration records.
The Australia release walkthrough — including live demos — is available on-demand at ServiceNow Exchange.
We would love to keep the conversation going, so if you have any questions on any of the new Australia features, feel free to drop a comment below — we'll be sure to follow up with you.
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