Is domain separation the right choice?
Consider multiple factors to determine the best solution for your organisation
Consider multiple factors to determine the best solution for your organisation
Let’s say your company just completed an acquisition and you need to figure out what to do with your new entity’s data. Or maybe you need to separate data sets for different groups. Whatever the reason, should you consider domain separation? What exactly is it and would it work for your company?
Domain Separation allows organisations to separate application data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called “domains.” It’s beneficial for companies who:
Case study
To better understand Domain Separation, let’s look at what happened with a leading healthcare data centre hosting services company that was struggling with a lack of unified business processes across its affiliates. This was causing data redundancies, as well as scattering of data across multiple systems.
On top of that, these systems had no proper security controls. In addition, the affiliates were using various IT service management (ITSM) tools that were not integrated with each other, resulting in delayed approvals and request fulfillments. Costs and support needs increased, and there was a lack of ownership and accountability when it came to outages.
To address this dilemma, the company teamed with Trianz to implement Domain Separation using ServiceNow, to:
As a result, the company realised its vision of streamlining and delivering consistent processes across all affiliates by maintaining data separation between the different business entities with shared infrastructure services support. The transformation:
What to consider
Before deciding on domain separation, companies should ask:
In addition, companies need to weigh the benefits and drawbacks. Domain separation will increase service providers’ employee productivity; speed up customer onboarding; drive efficient administration; and instate common processes across affiliates and domains. On the other hand, domain separation adds administration overhead. Also, it can be disabled, but it can’t be removed from an instance.
What are the alternatives?
If domain separation isn’t the right choice for your company, you could consider separate instances or a single instance without a domain.
The separate instances option provides flexibility with meeting requirements for customers without having an impact on others. You can build it to suit each customer or organisation; minimise the impact of customisation on others; have a clean separation of data; and release-schedule coordination. The downsides include cost, having to align instances, testing effort for upgrades, duplication of efforts, and required integrations.
A single instance without a domain separation could cost less and it may be enough to address simple scenarios. However, it would require extensive modifications to the baseline code—which would be skipped during upgrades—and broad testing. Also, you would have to address all secondary and supporting tables.
Taking the next step
If domain separation is the right fit for your situation, incorporating ServiceNow’s ITSM platform into your business will change the way many things are done for the better. These adjustments will help streamline both IT and business systems to provide the maximum return on investment for all IT expenses.
KC Sreeram is Vice President and Suresh Yellanti is a Director at Trianz. Read the full domain separation case study on Trianz.com.