M&A - Cybersecurity in mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a fundamental element in the commercial strategy of companies globally. In this way, organizations increase their market share, international footprint, diversify their services and acquire technology.
Like any operation, there are also more or less successful M&A.
Some success stories for companies and shareholders can be seen with the purchase of Pixar by Disney, and later by Marvel, or the purchase of Facebook on Instagram and WhatsApp.
However, negative results occur due to various factors, including external ones, such as changes in the economy, market disturbances, regulatory restrictions, and we are witnessing serious shortcomings in the execution of the integrations and the impossibility of materializing the expected results. Some failed processes are the acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft or the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo.
Every merger or acquisition involves a due diligence process . Due checks are a complicated and detailed process. Depending on this process, if the transaction is finally carried out, an integration process will begin that will have a significant influence on the overall success of the operation . As is foreseeable, each business has a clear dependence on its technological infrastructure and the human resources that operate it, presenting a clear challenge: combining completely different human teams and systems.
It is imperative that companies undertaking an M&A process adequately evaluate the IT infrastructure of their potential additions in order to safeguard customer, company and partner data, as well as ensure the integrity of business-critical systems. However cybersecurity is becoming a common blind spot for organizations involved in mergers and acquisitions. This leads to new serious vulnerabilities that cloud managers’ efforts to successfully integrate platforms, solutions, services, and people.
Companies embarking on M&A processes must have full visibility into their own systems and personnel, as well as the systems and personnel of the companies with which they are paired, if they are to give security the attention it deserves during the process.
Among the benefits that Kymatio provides:
Cyber risk reduction
Through periodic evaluation of the exposure related to the information security risk associated with people and the activation of mitigation measures
Strengthening
Determines the needs to strengthen the organization, obtaining a plan for human risk mitigation (micro-segmentation) at corporate, departmental and employee levels
Recurring evaluation
Periodic and automated evaluation that allows continuous monitoring of risk and accompanying employees in their awareness and strengthening
Actionable measures
Organizational charts with the state of risk, impact analysis, cyber awareness and other stressors such as wellbeing/sentiment analysis allow a complementary way to make decisions based on data
Efficiency
In the execution of actions and optimization in the use of protection and detection technologies