You’ve invested significant time and resources into your ServiceNow deployment, and as your organization scales its use of the platform, security hardening is critical. It helps you protect sensitive data, maintain compliance, and ensure operational continuity. Without proper hardening and security best practices, misconfigurations could expose your instance to unauthorized access, downtime, or compliance failures that undermine the very efficiency ServiceNow was designed to deliver. Explore how to protect your deployment and extend visibility to your security and risk teams.
Secure your ServiceNow deployment
ServiceNow Security Center (SSC) is a free application for system administrators to maintain platform security. It measures your hardening compliance, identifies misconfigurations that could pose security risks, and provides actionable guidance for remediation. Think of SSC as your security audit system—it tells you what's wrong and what you need to fix to keep your instance secure.
While SSC is a critical tool for protecting your ServiceNow instance, security and risk teams generally don’t have access to it, creating a blind spot. By integrating it with your broader security and risk management workflows, you can amplify the value of SSC through expanded collaboration and visibility.
Integrating SSC with Security Operations lets you create instance security incidents in the same workspace your security team already uses. Instead of requiring your team to check multiple systems, they can see platform-specific issues alongside network threats, endpoint alerts, and other security intelligence for a complete view of your security posture
Using SSC with Integrated Risk Management takes a different approach, enabling you to embed ServiceNow security compliance into your enterprise risk framework. You can continuously monitor your instance against hardening standards, assign risk scores to non-compliant settings, and track remediation alongside other organizational risks.
Three ways to use SSC with security and risk
Automatic incident creation for configuration changes
When a critical security setting shifts from compliant to non-compliant, your security team needs to know right away. By automatically generating a security incident when this occurs, you ensure your team receives immediate notification with full context. This automation prevents dangerous configuration drift from going unnoticed. If the situation is caused by a malicious insider, Security Incident Response can also invoke workflows to block a user account and notify human resources.
Proactive compliance monitoring
You can configure a risk indicator in Integrated Risk Management to query SSC regularly for hardening compliance status. If settings remain non-compliant for more than 30 days (or another duration as required by organizational policies), the indicator will fail and automatically create a risk issue. The risk team can then work with the platform administrator on mitigation.
Consolidated management of misconfigurations
Monitor hardening settings alongside other configuration issues in ServiceNow Configuration Compliance. Non-compliant results show as test failures for remediation, and they can also be rolled up to corresponding controls in IRM, providing visibility as part of IT risk. This unified perspective ensures nothing falls through the cracks and gives your leadership team a comprehensive view of your security posture.
Your next steps
These integrations represent an opportunity to enhance security and risk management for your ServiceNow deployment. Whether you build these connections yourself or work with a partner, the result is a more resilient platform that keeps your organization’s data and operations secure.
