Navigating ServiceNow Domain Separation

Navigating ServiceNow Solutions: Exploring Domain Separation for Optimal Business Success

Are you seeking a robust solution to efficiently manage multiple entities or units within your enterprise while maintaining strict data separation? Envisioning a centralised reporting system that seamlessly accommodates multiple customers within a single instance of a software or application? Then, join me as we explore the dynamic world of multi-tenant architecture.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, where scalability, efficiency, and streamlined operations are paramount, multi-tenant architecture emerges as a game-changer. It empowers businesses, like yours, to unlock the full potential of applications, enabling secure data separation and centralised management.

Multi-Tenant Architecture: A Game-Changer for Business

As a business owner, you understand the critical importance of scaling operations while maintaining security and efficiency. But how can you achieve this balance without incurring additional costs or compromising data protection?

Enter multi-tenant architecture — a software design pattern that has the potential to revolutionise your business. By leveraging multi-tenant architecture, you can scale your applications without the need for redundant infrastructure, saving you both time and resources.

However, multi-tenant architecture offers more than just cost savings. It can significantly enhance the security and efficiency of your applications. Through data isolation, multi-tenant architecture safeguards sensitive information, thwarting unauthorised access. Additionally, centralised management leads to improved application performance and reliability.

Imagine a modern office complex housing multiple companies. Each company operates independently, with its own offices and sensitive information. Despite sharing the same building, each company’s workspace is isolated and secure, ensuring privacy and confidentiality. This concept of isolated workspaces is called domain separation.

ServiceNow Domain Separation

In the context of ServiceNow, domain separation is a security feature that allows you to logically isolate different areas of your application in separate security domains. This means that users in one domain cannot access data or resources in another domain, even if they have the same user-name and password.

What is Logical Separation?

Logical Separation is where the customer data and processes are separated from other users but ultimately the entire data is stored in the centralised system of ServiceNow.

Domain separation is a critical security feature for multi-tenant applications. Multi-tenant applications are applications that are shared by multiple organisations. This means that there is a risk that users from one organisation could access data from another organisation. Domain separation helps to mitigate this risk by isolating each organisation’s data in a separate domain.

There are several notable benefits to incorporating domain separation within your ServiceNow environment:

Improved Security: Domain separation provides a robust security framework by effectively segregating data and preventing unauthorised access. By creating separate domains for each customer or business unit, you establish strict boundaries, ensuring that users within one domain cannot access sensitive data from other domains. This enhances data protection and confidentiality, mitigating the risks associated with unauthorised data exposure.

Increased Scalability: With domain separation, your application can achieve greater scalability and performance. By isolating different areas of the application in separate domains, you prevent performance issues in one domain from impacting others. This scalability allows you to handle increased data volumes and user traffic without sacrificing application performance, ensuring a seamless user experience across all domains.

Enhanced Flexibility: Domain separation empowers you with greater flexibility in designing and deploying applications within your ServiceNow environment. You can create separate domains for different stages of the development lifecycle, such as development, testing, and production. This enables you to efficiently test new features, deploy updates, and troubleshoot issues without affecting the integrity of production data. The flexibility provided by domain separation allows for streamlined development processes and more efficient application management.

By leveraging the advantages of domain separation in ServiceNow, you can elevate the security, scalability, and flexibility of your applications. It enables you to deliver a secure and efficient user experience, safeguard sensitive data, and effectively manage diverse customer requirements or business units.

Securing Data and Streamlining Operations: The Domain Separation Hierarchy in ServiceNow

The domain separation hierarchy in ServiceNow consists of three types of domains:

• Top Domain: The top domain serves as the root of the hierarchy and contains all other domains within it.
• Parent Domain: Parent domain users have access to both global & child domain records, and control over the child domain only
• Child Domain: Child domain users have no access to or control over parent domain records but can access global domain

By strategically planning and organising your domain hierarchy, you can enhance the security, scalability, and efficiency of your ServiceNow instance. A well-designed domain separation hierarchy ensures data security, efficient process management, and effective control over user permissions.

Domain Visibility: Controlling Access Beyond the Hierarchy

In the domain separation hierarchy, users within a domain typically have visibility into their own domain and any domains beneath it in the hierarchy. However, there are scenarios where it becomes necessary to grant access to domains outside of the traditional parent-child relationship. This is where domain visibility options come into play:

• Contains Domains: This option allows an entire domain to access another domain located in a different part of the domain hierarchy. It enables broader visibility across domains that are not directly connected in the hierarchy.
• Visibility Domains: With this option, specific users and groups can be granted access to a domain located in a different section of the domain hierarchy. It offers more granular control over domain visibility for targeted users or groups.

It’s important to note that while Contains Domains and Visibility Domains provide flexibility in granting access beyond the hierarchy, they should not be seen as substitutes for proper hierarchy configuration. These options are typically used when the hierarchy alone cannot fulfil the requirements for data separation and business logic.

For instance, consider the scenario of a Managed Service Provider (MSP) working with multiple tenants. The MSP domain cannot be a parent domain of the tenants, as it would result in the tenants inheriting the MSP’s business logic. In such cases, Contains Domains or Visibility Domains can be employed to ensure efficient collaboration while maintaining the necessary data separation and business logic integrity.

When to Use Domain Separation: Not all data segregation use cases require Domain Separation. Domain Separation is designed for use in environments where multiple tenants require data and process segregation, but the entire environment is managed by a single group.

Navigating the Challenges: Exploring the Limitations of Domain Separation

The potential drawbacks of domain separation include:

• Irreversible activation: Once domain separation is activated in your instance, it cannot be disabled or reversed. This is a permanent change that requires careful consideration before implementation.
• Ongoing monitoring and configuration management: Setting up domain separation requires continuous monitoring to ensure proper configuration. This includes assigning users to specific domains and managing their visibility. Regular maintenance is necessary to maintain the effectiveness of domain separation.
• Limited application support: While domain separation is designed to provide data and process segregation for multiple tenants, it may not be supported for every application initially. Some applications may require additional customisation or updates to fully leverage domain separation.
• Dependency on service providers: Domain separation administered by service providers may not be suitable for customers who prefer having their own roadmaps and full control over their processes and configuration. It is important to assess the level of flexibility and independence required for your business before opting for domain separation through service providers.

It is essential to carefully evaluate these potential drawbacks and weigh them against the benefits and requirements of your specific use case before implementing domain separation.

Here are some additional points that you may want to consider:

• Cost: Domain separation can add to the cost of your ServiceNow instance, as you will need to purchase additional licences and support.
• Complexity: Domain separation can be a complex and time-consuming implementation, so you will need to have a dedicated team to manage it.
• Change management: Domain separation can require significant changes to your processes and workflows, so you will need to carefully manage the change management process.

Stay tuned for future blogs where I will dive deeper into how domain separation works with different modules in ServiceNow. Keep watching this space for more insightful content.