A Practical Approach to Streamline M&A

Mergers and acquisitions often sound amazing to the Board, but they can become an operational nightmare for the infrastructure, networking, and security teams. In recent years, I’ve worked with a fair few highly acquisitive organisations and so I have seen firsthand that the practical steps to onboard new users can become hugely challenging–especially when the two organisations are running different technologies.

As a Solutions Engineer, one of my roles is to speak to key stakeholders–ranging from CIOs and CISOs to their architect teams–to understand the pain points of an organisation. Throughout these conversations a common question is always asked: “What are other organisations doing to make M&A easy … and what are the practical steps?”

Our approach is to focus on connecting people to applications and data, not devices to networks. That’s a catchy soundbite, but it informs the way we approach the process in very practical ways across in answer to four areas of consideration:

1. Due diligence
2. Integration planning 
3. Transitioning from VPN to ZTNA
4. Deployment

Below are practical steps that an organisation can take to help smooth the process of an acquisition. I will also provide key considerations in each phase to ensure that achievable objectives are set:

1. Due Diligence Phase

Key Considerations

1. Can you ensure sensitive data is properly handled during the due diligence process?
2. Can you monitor data transfers between acquirer and acquiree and detect threats, mitigate vulnerabilities, and ensure both companies are aware of attempted attacks?

The key word in this phase is… DISCOVERY. Discovery is essential as part of an overall cloud security strategy but even more so during an M&A. What do I mean by discovery? I mean identifying users, devices, and applications (both private local apps and SaaS/IaaS) within an organisation. This discovery process allows the parent organisation to understand where potential risks may lurk when onboarding acquired users. An example of discovery within a cloud security platform is using a tool that has a rich library of cloud applications and provides contextual insights into each application determining a confidence level. With this data the organisation can easily define a set of sanctioned and unsanctioned applications which is then reflected in a policy to warn users when accessing unsanctioned apps.

2. Integration Planning

Key Considerations

1. Can you proactively educate users during the acquisition?
2. Can you determine where you have duplicate technologies implemented?
3. Can you identify and manage third party integrations?

We’ve all been there, trying to access an application or perform an activity which isn’t permitted within our organisation and receiving a frustrating error message, then having to log a ticket with IT. This can become more of a pain during an acquisition when users aren’t aware of the acceptable usage policy (AUP ) set by the parent company. 

Using a tool such as user coaching within the Netskope One platform allows security administrators to create policies and templates which will provide coaching messages to inform and educate the user when they have violated policy (e.g. accessing a personal instance of Google Drive). It also provides the user with an opportunity to enter a justification which can hugely benefit the security admins, as it can help them understand the specific use cases and needs among their new colleagues, as well as significantly reducing the number of tickets logged.

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