Internally here at Microsoft, our strategic partnership with ServiceNow is designed to enhance the integration and optimization of our two companies’ products, platforms, and cloud capabilities.
Our decision to move the ServiceNow platform to Azure has proven to be a game-changer. This collaborative journey seamlessly blends the robust capabilities of ServiceNow with the cutting-edge infrastructure of Azure, ushering in a new era of agility, innovation, and customer-centric solutions.
—Katharine Kennedy, global head and general manager, ServiceNow Business Unit, Microsoft
The recent migration of our internal ServiceNow instances to Microsoft Azure is an excellent example of that partnership in action. With ServiceNow’s help and expertise in digital workflows, we’ve completed a smooth and effective migration and created a blueprint for other enterprises to follow that will enhance operational efficiencies, drive productivity, and optimize cloud costs.
“Our decision to move the ServiceNow platform to Azure has proven to be a game-changer,” says Katharine Kennedy, global head and general manager of the ServiceNow Business Unit at Microsoft. “This collaborative journey seamlessly blends the robust capabilities of ServiceNow with the cutting-edge infrastructure of Azure, ushering in a new era of agility, innovation, and customer-centric solutions.”
As we continue our transformative journey together, ServiceNow and Microsoft have deepened our partnership to create a new era of innovation and collaboration across industries. Together, we’re empowering organizations to bring intelligence to every corner of the enterprise and drive business transformation at scale.
—Paul Fipps, president, Global Industries and Strategic Growth, ServiceNow
The partnership has been equally strong on the ServiceNow side.
“As we continue our transformative journey together, ServiceNow and Microsoft have deepened our partnership to create a new era of innovation and collaboration across industries,” says Paul Fipps, president of Global Industries and Strategic Growth at ServiceNow. “Together, we’re empowering organizations to bring intelligence to every corner of the enterprise and drive business transformation at scale.”
Accelerating innovation with Microsoft Azure
At Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—we’re focused on agility, innovation, and our customers. We recognized the innovative potential of combining the data and AI capabilities of Azure with ServiceNow’s expertise in digital workflows.
Tighter integration across products and services was a key driver for our migration approach. We anticipated hosting ServiceNow instances in Azure would accelerate collaborative innovation and deepen the interoperability between technology solutions for both companies.
However, to introduce these new connected experiences, we needed to address the risks of moving our ServiceNow instances to Azure. Moving critical data and resources from one environment to another without impacting the business can be difficult. And even the most prepared organizations can face compliance issues related to security configuration and data management.
To carefully plan around these anticipated challenges, we worked closely with ServiceNow. Together, we created a detailed and standardized migration plan aligned with the company’s business objectives, policies, best practices, and current legal and commercial agreements.
Collaborating and planning for a successful move
Effective planning and communication are critical to a successful move. That’s why the first step we and ServiceNow took was to establish a virtual team (v-team) with clearly identified stakeholders across both organizations that supervised the smooth completion of the project. Roles and responsibilities were clearly defined from the start, with designated contacts to manage potential complications proactively.
The v-team then worked together to define the policies governing the move to Azure and established the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success. Some of the requirements of the joint initiative included keeping business impact to a minimum, ensuring feature parity between the ServiceNow instances hosted on ServiceNow’s private cloud and the instances deployed on Azure, preparing a rollback plan during migration, and aligning support post-migration.
We set an ambitious goal to move all of our ServiceNow instances to Azure within one month, starting with the nonproduction instances. This fast turnaround required both teams to be proactive participants in the process, meeting multiple times a week to review progress, share updates, identify blockers, and openly discuss questions and concerns. Stakeholders established a dedicated Microsoft Teams channel to strengthen communication, allowing real-time interaction and prompt resolution of issues.
Accounting for business impact
Minimizing business disruption was a big priority for the v-team. ServiceNow conducted extensive load simulation tests to confirm that the move to Azure would not negatively affect business operations. This effort was complemented by detailed architectural reviews undertaken by the ServiceNow Architecture Team, responsible for ensuring a robust and efficient transition to the cloud. Proactive monitoring by hyper-care teams and the deployment of monitoring dashboards during the move to Azure also played a pivotal role in minimizing business impact.
It feels good for Microsoft Digital to be Customer Zero and document learnings along the way and help other enterprise customers understand how they can achieve a similar outcome.
—Anahit Hovhannisyan, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital
Customizing the move to Azure
Microsoft Digital is Customer Zero for Microsoft products. We adopt and implement our products because we’re confident in their capabilities and it helps our product teams improve their products and test new functionality. Moving our ServiceNow instances to Azure as Customer Zero has created a helpful proof-of-concept for our Microsoft Azure product group and it’s helped us create an adoptable process for Microsoft Azure and ServiceNow customers.
“It feels good for Microsoft Digital to be Customer Zero and document learnings along the way and help other enterprise customers understand how they can achieve a similar outcome,” says Anahit Hovhannisyan, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital.
We took a balanced approach to our move to Azure, combining automated and manual methods customized for each ServiceNow instance. Our teams also made strategic timing decisions in advance to ensure business continuity while ensuring stakeholders had enough time to perform go-live testing and validations before signoff. Robust contingency plans, including rollback strategies and the efficient use of a digital operations center, exemplified the project’s meticulous organization. These efforts resulted in a remarkably smooth and effective move, accomplished over an intensive planning period.
Lessons learned and best practices
We learned many important lessons throughout our move to Azure. Capturing these lessons and understanding how they could affect future migrations is integral to building best practices for moving ServiceNow instances to Azure. Some of these best practices include:
- Plan with the user in mind. The user’s experience remained Microsoft’s primary focus throughout the planning stage.
- Clearly document everything. Microsoft and ServiceNow ensured that all identified stakeholders could sign off on business objectives and key results with a well-documented scope in place to guide the project forward.
- Establish a strong communication channel. A consistent communication cadence was pivotal to our success. We established and used a virtual Teams channel solely dedicated to the project.
- Prepare for testing and rollbacks. The process included a test run in a sandbox environment and ensured the team had a well-structured rollback plan.
- Migrate in phases. We performed the migration in phases, beginning with smaller instances to ensure manageability and minimize risks.
- Anticipate downtime and failure. Microsoft and ServiceNow planned for potential downtime and system failures with a hyper-care team on standby to provide immediate support. This support team gave Microsoft greater peace of mind, knowing there was a plan to contain unforeseen problems without risking the complete breakdown of critical infrastructure.
Enhancing experiences for employees and customers
ServiceNow and Microsoft have partnered since 2019 to jointly innovate for our US commercial customers and highly regulated markets in the US, Singapore, and Australia. Joint customers can benefit from these solutions and take advantage of Azure’s data protection, security, and privacy to keep their businesses running.
ServiceNow on Azure was introduced to US commercial customers in 2023 and is available on the Azure Marketplace. ServiceNow has worked closely with Microsoft as one of the first customers to move their digital workflows to Azure while realizing the benefits of integrating products across both ServiceNow and Microsoft portfolios.
ServiceNow is incredible and gives us full control over our data and cloud infrastructure. I can access everything from a single interface. Since moving ServiceNow to Azure, there have been no major impacts or changes to internal work processes. We keep leveraging all the incredible capabilities inherent to the ServiceNow platform with zero disruption.
—Miguel Meza, partner technology strategist, Microsoft
Our move from the ServiceNow cloud to Azure was completed in less than 45 days, and our team highlighted a seamless transition and lack of migration blockers as a notable takeaway from the process. For many team members, the most significant benefit was the lack of change and disruption to existing business processes post-migration.
Miguel Meza is a partner technology strategist at Microsoft who worked on the move and can attest to the benefits of hosting Microsoft’s ServiceNow instances in Azure.
“ServiceNow is incredible and gives us full control over our data and cloud infrastructure. I can access everything from a single interface. Since moving ServiceNow to Azure, there have been no major impacts or changes to internal work processes. We keep leveraging all the incredible capabilities inherent to the ServiceNow platform with zero disruption.”
Looking forward
The move to Azure ensures that our employees can benefit from tighter integrations between the ServiceNow platform and Azure services. We continue working with ServiceNow to introduce more Azure capabilities to the platform, accelerating innovation and expanding use cases.
With more than 100 native integrations, ServiceNow and Microsoft have no intention of slowing the rate at which we release new, integrated experiences. Our partnership will continue to enable collaboration, and we intend to bring more cognitive services and intelligence to products across the Now Platform with Microsoft 365 and Azure in the near future.
Here are a few remarkable aspects of our ServiceNow migration to Microsoft Azure:
- Microsoft and ServiceNow have a strategic partnership to enhance the integration and optimization of their products, platforms, and cloud capabilities.
- Microsoft has moved its internal ServiceNow instances from ServiceNow’s proprietary cloud to Azure.
- The move to Azure was completed in less than 45 days without significant issues.
- The move to Azure ensures that Microsoft employees benefit from tighter integrations between the ServiceNow platform and Azure services.
- ServiceNow and Microsoft continue collaborating and intend to bring more cognitive services and intelligence to products across the ServiceNow Platform with Microsoft 365 and Azure.
Learn more about ServiceNow on Azure today.
Learn more about our ServiceNow and Microsoft partnership.
Explore using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support at Microsoft.
Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
