Chat with Dan: How can ServiceNow improve digital resiliency?

"Hey everybody, Dan Marsh here, Head of ServiceNow at AC3. I'm here today to talk about how organisations can improve and uplift their digital resilience with ServiceNow playing a key role to complement those aspirations.

We are living in unprecedented times, where digital transformation is constantly on the rise.

We've got growing compliance risk. We've got a higher reliance on third and fourth party vendors.

And cyber security is one of the biggest business imperatives that organisations have today.

So, in terms of using ServiceNow and leveraging ServiceNow to complement your digital resilience efforts, there are some key capabilities that AC3 are having constant conversations with our customers about to really help with these objectives.

And I'm going to list some of those capabilities today and how they can complement your organisation. But also, we do have an eBook which is going to dive into this in a lot more detail coming out very shortly.

So, first and foremost, one of the most critical capabilities and solutions in ServiceNow, which will complement all other solutions on the platform that have really aimed at improving digital resilience is making sure that you have a very robust and complete CMDB.

For those that don't know, the CMDB is a centralised database of essentially, your technology stack, your services, and it really is that trusted data set to understand what you have deployed in the technical environment.

It is the nucleus of ServiceNow. So if you get the CMDB right, it is actually I'm gonna say the foundation for leveraging and extracting the most value out of other solutions that ServiceNow offer.

As an example, if you have a robust CMDB, your monitoring and event management strategy can mature.

If you have a complete CMDB, you then have the ability to start mapping technical components to business services to start actually, changing the conversation between IT teams and line of business functions.

You stop, it's an enabler for stop talking in technical jargon, and you start talking in business language.

It is a catalyst for helping you to correlate events that are triggered from your technology solutions so that you've got seamless automation and the ability to automate the ways in which you self resolve and automate how you engage your employees when things go wrong.

The CMDB also is a catalyst for how you adopt and mature your cyber security strategy.

If you're integrating cyber security tooling into the SecOps modules in ServiceNow, you have the ability to integrate cyber monitoring and really managing a threat intelligence and the different capabilities and vulnerabilities.

The CMDB complements those capabilities there, so that you have the ability to drive a robust orchestrated and I'm going to say a more holistic solution to improve your cyber resilience.

The next capabilities I want to talk about is the IT asset management capabilities in ServiceNow.

So, these capabilities look at software and hardware within your organisation.

One of the biggest challenges that we see within our customer’s organisations is really on driving effective life cycle management for hardware and making sure that from procurement through the retirement of your assets that you have a clear view of what you have deployed, who has them in their possession, and really helping to drive that the stability objectives of driving effective life cycle management, so that you can actually plan from a forecasting and budget perspective, when you need to renew the hardware deployed in your environment.

From a software perspective, improving your digital resilience is really around managing your compliance.

So, how do you manage your spends and have a clear view of the software deployed across your environment to make you really make informed decisions to remain compliant, make investments that make sense, and to actually forecast and plan your future software spend.

And the last capability I want to talk about today, which I'm going to say, a constantly maturing capability on the ServiceNow platform, is the integrated risk management capability or governance with compliance as it was previously called.

The solutions within the IRM or GRC suite of ServiceNow are very broad.

You have a risk management capability, you have a policy and compliance capability. You have a vendor risk management capability. You can track and manage audit engagements.

This capability is really helping to, I'm going to say, allow you to broaden your scope of governance, risk and compliance across your organisation.

It allows you to tap into the broader teams within your business to improve your digital resilience and actually improve the risk culture within your organisation.

So, if you are looking to move away from spreadsheets and, you know, I will say, don't feel too bad about that. That's a very common story that we do see with our customers.

But if you are looking to adopt GRC to improve digital resilience efforts, we always recommend to our customers to go through a crawl, walk, run approach. Start small and continue to improve.

Starting with a big bang, adopting the whole capability, can cause change fatigue.

And if you're moving from spreadsheets and you need to establish a lot of process that underpin these capabilities, starting off with risk management would be a great way to really get visibility of your risk portfolio across the entire organisation.

But also, building the resilience in the team and the understanding of your broader teams and how to adopt those capabilities.

So, hopefully you found this valuable. If you'd like to understand more, please feel free to reach out and we'd be happy to have a conversation."