During Mergers & Acquisitions, the organization's level of agility is crucial to the success of the M&A process. We outline three key areas where Identity and Access Management alleviates M&A challenges.
When you talk about business agility, you are talking about matching the pace and adaptability of your organization to market developments. It is simply about keeping up with customer expectations, competitive developments, and regulatory changes - all of which have a significant impact on how you do business. To succeed, organizations must be able to respond quickly to both internal and external changes and challenges - without losing focus on vision, goals, and core business processes.
This is particularly crucial in a Mergers & Acquisitions process. The success of the merger relies on the business to be agile. In this context, Identity and Access Management is a tailor-made discipline.
The 3 biggest challenges in the M&A-process
Almost all organizations today are technology-heavy. This makes the M&A process far more complex - and without the right tools, there is a substantial risk of the process being slowed down or even stopped altogether.
The three main agility challenges related to Mergers & Acquisitions are:
- Implementing modern technology in the organization is a troublesome and slow process
- It is difficult to retain talented employees during transformation processes
- Organizations in the middle of an M&A are a frequent target for cybercriminals.
The tool to overcome these challenges is an Identity and Access Management platform. Identity and Access Management is one of the most powerful agility enablers for the organization and the workforce.
Make it easy to implement new applications
Agility is closely linked to technology. Being able to quickly implement and de-implement applications as the organization's needs evolve is essential for the organization to keep pace in development.
After acquisition or merger, user data exists in many sources. When data is segmented in this way, it is a challenge to maintain it, maintain security and, most importantly, synchronize user data from one source to another.
This makes it hugely troublesome to deploy new applications and assign access to them. But with an Identity and Access Management solution, the organization gets a centralized platform from which all user profiles can be managed. From this platform, the organization can easily control which users should have access to which applications and systems.
This makes it easier to support the organization's productivity and security. And most importantly, the value of new applications is realized faster.
Make it easier to retain staff
Retaining employees in the new organizational structure is often highlighted as one of the biggest challenges in an M&A process. Failing to meet this challenge is also one of the biggest risks to the success of the process. Without the experienced key employees, it will only be more difficult to make the new organizational structure work.
A major annoyance for employees is the inability to effectively carry out their work tasks. This challenge often arises if employees cannot access the applications they need.
An Identity and Access Management platform ensures Day One Access for all employees. This makes it easy to maintain productivity and employee happiness in the new organizational structure because it becomes easy for the organization to automatically assign employees access to the right groups, applications, and systems. This way, all accesses can be in place the first moment employees arrive at work under the new organizational structure.
Strengthen security before, during and after the M&A process
M&As are overly complex processes. Unfortunately, this also means that the maintenance and protection of IT systems is often neglected when integrating the technology platforms of two organizations. Cybercriminals know this, and they know how to exploit it.
Neglecting the systems means that they can easily access sensitive personal data or exploit stolen user identity data. This is a serious threat, because there is nothing like a cyber-attack to cripple an organization and hamper its agility potential.
Identity and Access Management is essential to maintaining security before, during and after the new organizational structure falls into place. With a streamlined platform, the organization will constantly have a full overview of all user identities and their accesses.
This makes it easy to ensure that no employee has more access than they need. This poses a significant risk because users with privileged access to systems are a frequent target for cybercriminals. Users with unnecessary access are also at higher risk of inadvertently - due to carelessness or ignorance of security procedures - compromising internal data.
SIVIS Group
