Expert IT Guidance for Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions require complex technical and business process integration across all systems and applications, often under tight timelines. AdaptivEdge has assisted organizations of all sizes and industries with restructuring since our founding in 2013. If your team needs help navigating an M&A integration, we can help.
Critical Microsoft Consolidation & Migration Considerations
For most organizations, Microsoft systems and applications represent the most critical elements to address as part of a corporate restructuring. To facilitate day-one communication and ensure you have control of your acquired data and intellectual property, AdaptivEdge carefully considers each aspect of your M&A integration.
Microsoft 365 Consolidation
Consolidating Microsoft 365 content into a single tenant is critical, as it unifies communication and collaboration between both entities and ensures data sovereignty. This step usually requires migrating Exchange mailboxes and Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive site content. AdaptivEdge leverages AvePoint’s FLY migration tool for these complex Microsoft 365 migrations.
Your M&A integration may also require migrating Power Platform workloads, Entra ID single sign-on configurations, and Intune device enrollment. We carefully inventory and review all Microsoft tenants, workloads, and content to understand what needs to be migrated. Your consultant will then review content with organizational stakeholders to design a thoughtful information architecture that reflects how the consolidated organization will function in the future.
Active Directory Consolidation
While Entra ID allows multiple Active Directory forests to synchronize users to a single Entra ID tenant — enabling organizations to defer Active Directory consolidation for months and sometimes years — most organizations eventually need to merge their Active Directory environments into a single forest. This can be complex, impacting user workstations, authentication to on-premises line of business applications, and service accounts used by servers, databases, and applications.
To mitigate operational disturbances, we’ll create a detailed plan and co-existence strategy for interoperability between two or more Active Directory forests using Quest’s Migration Manager for Active Directory, a best-of-breed tool for complex Active Directory migrations.
Unifying Security and Compliance
When merging two companies, setting clear controls for security, compliance, and governance in the consolidated Microsoft 365 tenant and enrolled devices is critical. In an acquisition scenario, the acquiring organization’s security and compliance controls typically take precedence, dictating and overriding the controls leveraged by the acquired company. In this case, offering end-user training to the acquired team can help them adapt to new policies.
It’s worth noting that we often encounter situations involving more complex configurations. For example, the acquired company may be subject to different compliance regulations and controls due to the countries in which it operates, the storage of sensitive data, or stipulations in crucial customer or vendor contracts. The acquired entity may also have business requirements that require adjusting or fine-tuning existing policies. Ongoing litigation requiring legal holds can also impact consolidation efforts. Whatever your precise situation is, we can help you navigate it.
Change Management and Cultural Alignment
Mergers and acquisitions can significantly impact employee morale thanks to the stress of learning new applications, abiding by new security and compliance standards, and adapting to a new culture. Your AdaptivEdge consultant can help you foster cultural alignment with internal communication tools like Microsoft Teams, shared document repositories in SharePoint, and workshops to introduce new tools and emphasize merger goals.
Meet Your Mergers & Acquisitions Consultant
Eddie Alvarez is a Microsoft Systems Engineer. He is excited to bring his experience from across a wide range of storage and server technologies to your M&A project!
Get to know Eddie more on our team page:
8 Steps to Successful M&A Integration
Ensuring a successful consolidation of cloud and on-premises Microsoft identities, emails, files, devices, and security settings requires careful planning and execution. Our standard M&A integration process involves the following steps:
- A thorough assessment of both organizations’ existing IT infrastructures, Microsoft 365 subscriptions, tech stacks, and usage patterns.
- Collaboration with stakeholders to define a unified vision for the merged environment and identify potential overlaps, redundancies, and gaps.
- Development of a comprehensive data migration strategy to ensure the seamless transfer of critical information, prioritizing data security by implementing a zero-trust framework and performing test migrations in a controlled environment.
- Maintenance of security and compliance using Microsoft 365’s security features, such as Entra ID Conditional Access and Purview Information Protection.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy implementation to prevent unauthorized data sharing and collaborate with legal and compliance teams to meet regulatory requirements.
- Establishing a change advocate network across both entities and providing frequent communication to facilitate change management.
- Developing and delivering custom training plans to help employees onboard to new processes.
- Streamlining tools and workflows to enhance efficiency. This includes consolidating applications and identity management, establishing cross-company communication, and ensuring a unified information architecture.
