Mergers & Acquisitions: How IAM Solutions Make Day One Access a Reality

    

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So your company is buying a company….

This is undoubtedly a huge step forward for your organization and a reason for celebration, but if you’re part of the IT department, you might be more focused on the long list of important tasks to be done immediately after the contract is signed.

Your organization will suddenly become responsible for all aspects of operations for your newly purchased company, and your management team will no doubt have the expectation of a speedy and flawless integration.

With your company’s future on the line and IT being the biggest factor impacting the success or failure of an merger & acquisition (M&A), you’re likely feeling the pressure to perform. After all, the IT team is responsible for ensuring access, integrating systems, and taking over compliance, security, and all else imaginable. What’s more, the longer it takes your team to execute, the higher the risk for security gaps, employee frustration and turnover, customer dissatisfaction, and lost profits.

Management will be looking to your IT team to execute a quick and seamless transition. And IT should look to a modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution to help them deliver.

In this five part blog series, we’ll cover the most pressing IT challenges faced during M&A integration and how utilizing a modern IAM solution both before and during the changeover can streamline, simplify, and centralize the transition, while enabling quicker time to value.

Overcoming Slow, Disjointed Onboarding and Access During an M&A

IT is saddled with the unfair expectation that everyone who needs access to the other company's systems will have it the day the contract is signed.

For this to happen, IT must know who needs access to what resources, and then, immediately give them that access. However, it is not realistic to set up permissions one by one for every individual.

Still, this does not mitigate the fact that employees need immediate access to do their jobs; they can’t wait weeks or months for critical resources. The longer onboarding takes, the longer it takes to realize value from the new acquisition and the more your organization is at risk of talent loss. In fact, losing talent is the number-one perceived risk for buyers when it comes to M&A.

After all, a merger or acquisition naturally increases employee anxiety about job stability. If employees face disruptions or cannot access the systems they need to do their jobs, this only increases frustration and anxiety, and job satisfaction suffers as a result.

Higher employee attrition can, in turn, affect customer satisfaction, delay the release of new products or services, disrupt plans to enter new markets, and even reduce the projected value of the merger.  

Grant Day-One Access with Modern IAM

Modern IAM solutions enable companies to grant day-one access to corporate resources (or even pre-day-one access). A modern IAM platform can swiftly connect to the directory of the acquired company without network configuration issues—regardless of what type of directory system it is. Once connected, your IT team can easily grant users at both companies access to parent- or acquired-company systems and applications.

Onboarding is a simple, streamlined process with modern IAM. That’s because account creation and management can be fully automated using workflow-driven user provisioning and multi-directory identity and resource administration.

Access rights can also be dynamically added and removed based on a user’s specific attributes or role by implementing role- and attribute-based provisioning policies. This makes it possible for IT administrators to quickly assign users the proper permissions without any guesswork or room for error.

Some IAM solutions even offer sponsorship capabilities that enable IT administrators to easily grant access even before bringing on accounts. Sponsorship is an easy way to provide access for people not yet in the parent company’s human resources system, with the same level of identity lifecycle management and IT oversight as for full-time employees.

M&A Underway: The Next Challenge

With a modern IAM solution in place, ensuring new employees can access resources needed complete their job functions to keep the organization running smoothly is simplified and streamlined. However, for IT, the M&A integration process is just getting started.

In part 2, we’ll cover the issue of managing identities across multiple domains, a task which can eat up a large amount of IT resources if not handled properly, and we’ll detail how IAM can not only provide a solution, but can also provide options for your team.

IT Success in M&A Starts with IAM

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