The planet runs on data. In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we understand, more than at any time in our past, just how important it is to have access to data-driven applications, services, and functions in every form.

ServiceNow has operated with a wholly data-centric mindset from our inception in 2004. As we look to the needs of enterprises between now and the end of this decade, we have built out our strategy for future services provision by investing in new physical data centre facilities in Europe.

Our data centre infrastructure is now bolstered by two new locations: Newport, United Kingdom, and Dublin, Ireland. The new data centres establish two new pairings for the hosting of customer instances: a UK sovereign pair between London and Newport, and an EU sovereign pair between Amsterdam and Dublin.

This infrastructure development ensures we are continuing to support increasing demand from customers for cloud-native technologies, as they leave behind legacy infrastructures to accelerate their digital transformation journeys with increased cloud adoption. Our expanded data centre footprint across Europe also helps customers navigate the post‑Brexit landscape.

OpEx for resilience and agility

As businesses in every vertical move toward business models centred on OpEx (operational expenditure), they can create more agility as they free themselves up from the CapEx-heavy ways of the past.

This agility naturally enables heightened business resilience in fast-changing markets (even without the disruption factor that comes with global health crises) and helps the business deliver improved customer experiences.

Business resilience comes in various forms, but primarily we are talking about the capacity and ability to recover fast when commercial, operational, or other external issues happen.

When business resilience is maximised, then applications and services don’t break when workload or data throughput demands change, or indeed when new integrations need to be made. These new data centres in EMEA will support this need for controlled continuity in the face of change.

Parallel instance redundancy

All our customer environments are operated on the basis of Active-Active, not Primary-Backup. Deploying on an Active-Active basis means that, with two nodes always running simultaneously, the highest levels of load balancing can be achieved. These new data centre pairings form part of ServiceNow’s Advanced High Availability Architecture and continue to ensure the scalability of our cloud services.

The investment takes ServiceNow’s global data centre pairs to 11, spanning five continents with six global support centres, which work tirelessly to serve customers’ digital transformation needs.

Gravitational pull toward platform proximity

We know that the move to cloud and digital workflows requires customers to adopt more software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Of course, every customer journey is different, but the gravitational pull toward the cloud helps businesses achieve a higher level of operational excellence.

This pull ultimately results in consolidation and utilisation of around five to six key platforms used by the typical enterprise (e.g., operating system, database), all of which can be integrated effectively and seamlessly. This is where ServiceNow’s role as the platform of platforms comes into its own—bringing together IT infrastructures and powering digital workflows across the entire enterprise.

The COVID-19 pandemic aside, the world has been going through more change in recent years than any of us could possibly have imagined at the start of the millennium.

Continuing to build out our data centre backbone as we have done will enable ServiceNow to provide business resilience and agility to create outstanding customer experiences everywhere and at any time, even when observing social distancing!