Higher Education
50+ Million Record Migration Across ServiceNow Instances in Higher Education
A higher-education customer needed to consolidate two ServiceNow instances with overlapping data, irreconcilable customizations, and live ticket flows. We migrated 50M+ records with zero data loss and a single weekend cutover.
- 50M+ Records migrated
- 0 Records lost or orphaned
- 1 weekend Cutover window
The situation
A large higher-education customer was operating two ServiceNow instances — one inherited from an acquisition, the other their original — and the cost of maintaining both had outgrown the cost of consolidating them. Both instances had years of customization, overlapping ITSM processes, and live, mission- critical ticket flows.
The challenge
Cleanly merging two ServiceNow instances is hard for a few reasons:
- Sys IDs collide.
- Custom tables are rarely 1:1.
- Reference fields point to records that may or may not exist on the destination.
- Live ticket flows can’t be paused for weeks.
What we did
- Source profiling. Three weeks profiling both instances. We catalogued every customization, every reference field, every business rule.
- Mapping with sign-off. Field-level mapping documents went to business owners for sign-off before any data moved.
- Migration runbook. A versioned cutover runbook including rollback procedure, owners, and blackout windows.
- Reconciliation. Post-migration, every record had its source and destination sys IDs logged so we could prove the migration record-by-record.
The outcome
50M+ records migrated, zero data loss, single weekend cutover. The customer’s support team was working in the consolidated instance Monday morning with no service disruption.
If your situation is similar, we’d be happy to talk.