Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) offer companies opportunities for growth, allowing them to expand their market reach, diversify their offerings, and gain competitive advantages. However, M&As also bring significant challenges, especially in integrating cloud infrastructure across the merged entities. For large multinational companies acquiring smaller firms, managing cloud complexity becomes a key element in ensuring smooth operations and long-term commercial success.
Integrating multi-cloud environments is a complex process. It requires more than just aligning technology, it involves the careful consideration of people, processes, and systems to create a unified, efficient, and secure cloud eco-system. This guide will explore how to manage cloud complexity at every stage of the M&A process – before, during, and after the transaction. Whether you are in the planning phase, mid-transition, or looking to optimize post-integration, you’ll find actionable insights here to help streamline your cloud operations, maximize value and manage cloud complexity.
Before the Merger or Acquisition: Planning and Strategy
Assess Existing Cloud Environments
The first step in managing cloud complexity during an M&A is a thorough assessment of all companies’ existing cloud environments. This includes evaluating key components such as the architecture, applications, security measures, and compliance standards already in place. Without this analysis, companies risk missing vital data, or even redundancies, which could slow down the integration process or jeopardize security.
Surveil’s Smart Tags offer a solution here by enabling advanced analysis and modelling. These advanced capabilities support cloud migrations, asset management, cost allocation, and operational hygiene. By tagging and categorizing cloud assets, companies gain deeper visibility into their infrastructure, making it easier to create and develop a clear integration strategy.
Plan for Identity Management (Active Directory)
Identity management is critical when integrating cloud environments, and needs to take place from the very start of the process. Active Directory helps with automating identity workflows, securing user access, and ensuring governance across large organizations. A well-structured identity management plan not only helps to secure the cloud environment but also maintains operational continuity.
The Surveil platform provides detailed insights into cloud account and group information, in-depth visibility into external identities, and analysis of Joiner/Mover/Leaver account statuses. This visibility helps companies stay on top of user and server accounts, ensuring they are properly managed during the M&A process and beyond.
Coordinate Teams Effectively
Effective cloud integration requires a coordinated effort across both organizations. Bring together a dedicated integration team including cloud architects, IT managers, and business analysts to make sure a range of perspectives are considered. Keep lines of communication open and encourage collaboration across teams.
Define Integration Goals
Setting clear, actionable goals for cloud integration is essential from day one. Companies need to define what the merged cloud environment should achieve in terms of performance, cost-efficiency, and scalability. This not only ensures seamless interoperability but also aligns cloud objectives with broader business goals.
By transforming real-time and raw data into actionable insights, Surveil empowers organizations to define cloud integration goals that are strategic, timely, and based on a comprehensive understanding of their current cloud environment and their post M&A aims.
Develop a Comprehensive Integration Plan
A well thoughtout integration plan should outline key milestones, timelines, and resource requirements. It must cover data migration, application integration, system interoperability, and risk management strategies to anticipate and mitigate potential challenges along the way.
Surveil’s robust multi-tenant support is especially beneficial for organizations with distributed cloud infrastructures, allowing them to consolidate cloud environments more efficiently. Surveil also relies on EntraID Connect to sync data, which enables cloud integration without needing constant direct access to on-premises systems.
During the Merger or Acquisition: Implementation and Execution
Carry Out Data and Application Migration
Once the M&A process begins, the first priority is to migrate data and applications to the new cloud environment. Using automated tools can significantly reduce downtime and the risk of data loss during migration. Ensure that critical systems and applications are prioritized to ensure operations continue without interruption during the transition period.
This is where Surveil’s powerful multi-tenant support capability can support, even if organizations have dispersed infrastructures. The Surveil platform can also support consolidation of cloud infrastructure if this is an objective of the merger or acquisition.
Manage devices
Managing user devices – laptops, desktops, and mobile devices – across the new organization is also critical during a merger or acquisition. Solutions like Intune, which enforces company policies and monitors security, can help keep devices compliant and secure.
The Surveil platform can further enhance device management by providing deep insights into device compliance, making the process of managing devices much more efficient.
Make Security a Priority
Security cannot be compromised during cloud integration. Companies must monitor account details, track sign-in information, and ensure that conditional access policies are in place.
The Surveil platform offers this much-needed visibility into user and Privileged Identity rights usage, ensuring that security is top priority throughout the integration process.
Monitor and Manage Performance
To maintain operational efficiency before and after an M&A, it’s important to continuously monitor the performance of the integrated cloud environment. Tracking key metrics such as system uptime, response times, and user satisfaction allows organizations to address performance issues promptly to get back on track.
With Surveil, organizations can gain greater visibility into their cloud state, enabling them to make informed decisions and ensure cloud services are fulfilling the needs of the growing business.
Optimize Licensing for Cloud Complexity
Cloud licensing can quickly become a financial burden if not managed properly during a merger or acquisition. Unused licenses and excessive cloud spend can lead to significant wastage.
Surveil offers valuable insights into cloud wastage, helping organizations optimize their M365 licensing to prevent unnecessary costs during and after the M&A.
After the Merger or Acquisition: Optimization and Ongoing Management
Evaluate and Optimize the New Environment
After the dust has settled, it’s time to conduct a post-integration review to evaluate the effectiveness of the new cloud environment. Identify areas for improvement, such as cost management, resource allocation, and performance tuning. Even if the cloud was optimized before the merger, there’s always room for further refinement and efficiency gains.
Leveraging automation technologies, such as right-sizing cloud resources, can help ensure that your cloud environment adapts to your organization’s growing needs without unnecessary over-provisioning.
This is where Surveil’s tailor-made recommendations engine comes in to help determine how resources are being used in the post-M&A cloud environment and how costs can be allocated going forward.
Control Your Entire IT Estate
Establishing a framework for ongoing evaluation and enhancement is the key to a successful long-term cloud strategy. As business needs evolve, organizations must regularly review and adapt their cloud practices to keep pace with technological advancements and changes to governance and compliance requirements. By doing so, they can maximize new opportunities for growth and efficiency, and future merges and acquisitions are likely to be more seamless.
An important aspect of controlling your IT estate post-merger or acquisition is establishing strong governance frameworks. Governance makes sure that all cloud resources are aligned with business aims, regulations, and security policies. After integration, cloud environments often become more complex, involving multiple platforms, regions, and service providers. A robust governance framework can mitigate risks, provide transparency, and maintain accountability as your organization evolves. Areas supported by a governance framework include:
- Standardization: It’s vital that cloud operations across the merged systems are brought together under standardized policies and procedures.
- Compliance: Post-migration governance ensures that all parts of the combined IT estate comply with relevant legal and industry standards, from data privacy regulations like GDPR or HIPAA to financial compliance such as SOX.
- Security: Governance provides a foundation for setting up clear security protocols, enforcing access controls, and auditing activities across the cloud environment to keep critical assets safe.
- Resource management: Governance frameworks can optimize resource usage and manage long term cloud spend according to business aims.
Post-merger or acquisition, the tools offered by Surveil can help in the ongoing management and optimization of the cloud, as well as enforce governance policies to ensure your cloud environment remains secure, compliant, and efficient.
Managing cloud complexity during mergers and acquisitions requires careful planning, strategic execution, and ongoing optimization. Surveil’s platform helps organizations predict trends, improve financial forecasting, and maintain a unified view of cloud environments, making it an essential tool for seamless cloud integration.
By focusing on the key areas of people, processes, and technology, global companies can integrate their cloud environments smoothly, ensuring that the combined organization operates efficiently and is well-prepared for future growth.
Explore the rest of the Surveil blog to learn more about how we can help you optimize your cloud strategy before, during, and after a merger or acquisition.