Some would liken the ServiceNow Security team to a silent, but highly skilled group of warriors working continuously to protect our customers and our services. To deliver that we have to ensure our company, people, and assets are secure. The fact is that our Security team is much more than that. They work tirelessly behind the scenes to constantly enrich ServiceNow’s security posture.

“Shadow IT” can be a divisive subject depending on how long you’ve been in the IT field. There is a legacy attitude within many IT teams that shadow IT must be controlled – but it can bring significant benefits to an organization. Modern IT teams understand these benefits, and focus on balancing shadow IT’s value and risk. Moving past that legacy attitude and developing a modern IT mentality in your organization can be difficult.

Many organizations are prioritizing the health and well being of their workforce in the wake of the current global pandemic. Many threat actors are also taking advantage of this opportunity. I’ve seen recent examples of social engineering—with calculated phishing campaigns preying on those who seek information on the COVID-19. As noted by Security Researcher Brian Krebs, one hacker group even used a copy of a legitimate map of the impact of the virus to infect machines with malware.

As federal, state, and local government agencies scramble to create emergency response processes and procedures, be advised that IT service management (ITSM) can play a critical role in supporting emergency response plans and associated processes. Government and commercial business emergency response plans define how agencies and commercial organizations respond to catastrophic events in the environment.

It starts with one call. Then another user opens a ticket reporting sluggish laptop performance. One more call comes in, then a few more similar incidents and service requests. By the time the Help Desk Agent can see the bottom of that first cup of coffee, a bigger problem is evident, but not quite yet visible.

COVID-19 has put the business continuity plans of every SaaS company to the test, and the test isn’t over. But we’ve learned a few things in the last week that I’m hoping will help your organization. It’s all about people This isn’t a traditional BC/DR scenario, where a disaster like an earthquake knocks a data center offline. It’s about how we adapt to support employees connecting and operating from home, so we can maintain our support for our customers.

On March 16th ServiceNow released four emergency response apps free of charge to help organizations manage through the COVID-19 pandemic. To date nearly 1,000 different organizations have started leveraging these apps to assist their employees during the crisis. They include federal and state agencies as well as hospitals and healthcare organizations. ServiceNow is working with its partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, DXC Technology, EY and KPMG, to distribute and support the apps.

As an IT leader, it’s important to step back, sometimes, and view what you can do better with your service desk. Because small issues and inefficiencies can easily add up to day-to-day chaos. In organizations where IT services are aligned with business objectives, they are more likely to make investments in new technologies like AI & ML. Periodic reviews will make sure that the alignment stays. Here we are going to look at some areas where putting efforts can yield significant result.

On March 16th, we announced our Customer Care Program, including four no-charge emergency response apps. We’ve already seen tremendous traction with the apps. As of March 25, nearly 1000 organizations have downloaded the apps. In addition, our amazing community has generated many new ideas, resources, tools, and stories. Some are best practices, some are specific to customers of the Now Platform®, and some come from ServiceNow partners who are helping with new apps, services, and strategy.