As users begin to embrace the power of the Cloud, Allan Leinwand is in charge of making sure everything goes off without a hitch. But unlike the consumer-grade services that are typically found in the Cloud, ServiceNow has a strong enterprise footprint. It has to deliver consumer-quality applications on enterprise-ready hardware. Fortunately, the service delivers on both.

Reliability, security and scalability

“We have forms, we have applications, we have integrations, we have all sorts of stuff pre-built that allows you to build service management apps really, really quickly. And because it is enterprise grade, with redundant fibers, and redundant power, and lots and lots of big iron in terms of server capability, we’ve got the ability to really grow as fast as the enterprise can grow,” Leinwand said in an interview with theCUBE at ServiceNow’s Knowledge15 event in Las Vegas.

Reliability, security and scalability are obviously major concerns for any enterprise thinking about moving their data onto the cloud. But ServiceNow has carefully planned the locations of its data centers to ensure the physical security of user data. Centers are deployed in pairs across eight general regions, and customer instances from that region are deployed across each pair with one data center acting as an “active” side and the other as a “passive” side. This preserves the data in the event of a problem on the active center.

In Leinwand’s words: “What happens is, for a given customer instance, their active instance would be in, say, side A. But at the exact same time, we are replicating their data in real time over to the passive side, in side B. And that gives us the ability that if something goes bump in the night in side A, we can quickly switch them over to side B.”

In Switzerland, for example, one center is located in Geneva, while the other is in Zurich, almost 200 miles away, providing redundancy in the event of a natural disaster or other crisis.

Synchronizing data across multiple locations and device

This cloud capability is extremely promising for companies that need to synchronize data across multiple locations and devices — especially when they need to adjust to changes in demand without input from IT.

“We have the ability to basically move the customer instance, we call it, and actually scale it up dynamically …. We will pick their instance up and we’ll move them, and we’ll scale them and we’ll make them bigger. They don’t have to ask us. It just sort of happens on demand. And the reason that’s so powerful is we don’t want the enterprise to think about [it] …. We just want them to think about deploying the application, and we’ll go ahead and scale it automatically,” Leinwand explained.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.