On the whole, 2023 was a slow year for mergers and acquisitions. The robust M&A activities that had powered 2021 and 2022 dropped from a boil to a slow simmer. However, analysts say 2024 will be different. Companies that sat on the sidelines last year are now poised to make large-scale moves.
This should be a sign to IT professionals: Get ready for a rush of migrations.
“Don’t let this M&A upturn take you by surprise,” Brian Levy of PwC said. “It’s coming, and when it does, it won’t be like [the] ones we have seen in the past.” Sixty percent of CEOs surveyed by PwC plan to make at least one acquisition in the next three years.
Morgan Stanley and Harvard are also calling for a surge of M&As in 2024, citing the pent-up energy and capital from a slower-than-expected 2023. EY Parthenon says that over the next 12 months, 58% of U.S. CEOs plan to divest an asset, 63% plan to form joint ventures around innovative tech, and just over half plan a merger or acquisition.
To the C-Suite, M&As mean growth, diversification, and increased competitive advantages. However, the success of these moves often lives and dies with the seamless integration of different IT systems. Such migrations are never easy. At the heart of these complex operations is the need to migrate Active Directory (AD) environments.
AD is the essential element of network administration and one of the most vital focus points during M&A migrations. If an AD is compromised during a poorly executed migration, it introduces a host of problems that include operational disruptions, security vulnerabilities, and compliance nightmares.
That’s why when IT teams are brought in during M&As, a seamless migration of the ADs must be priority one.
Why AD Migration is Key to Success
AD migrations must be front and center, not only because of their importance to business functions but because of the inherent complexity involved in such migrations. Here are a few reasons that AD migrations should be top of mind.
AD as IT lynchpin
When two or more organizations come together, each brings its own user accounts, security protocols, and resources. AD stands at the center of a complex project. It’s the common repository for user accounts, group policies, and other directory information. A smooth AD migration paves the way for the seamless integration of the different IT environments. A successful AD migration means successful operations post-merger.
Clean User Account Consolidation
When companies merge, they often come with massive numbers of user accounts from different domains or forests. Migrations must unify these disparate accounts into a single AD structure. This means not only organizing accounts but also groups, permissions, and other directory objects while maintaining user access and overall productivity.
Continuous User Access
Many essential business applications depend on AD for authentication. Without a clean AD migration, users might lose access to crucial applications such as SharePoint, grinding business to a halt. AD migrations mean updating configurations and dependencies across systems to ensure everyone can access the necessary tools.
Updating for Efficiency
A major benefit of AD migration is consolidation. This can reduce system complexity, streamline administration, and boost operational efficiency. Standardizing directory services helps reduce the overhead costs of maintaining multiple domains or forests while simplifying maintenance.
Risk Mitigation
Don’t overlook the security benefits of AD migrations. A smooth AD migration will ensure business continuity and regulatory compliance. But it’s also a powerful mitigation of security risks, as AD systems have become targets for bad actors.
The Complexity of AD Migrations in M&As
Organizations involved in M&As usually bring their own sets of complexities. Often, they have diverse IT environments with their own structures, domains, and forests that must be reconciled into a single, efficient system. The key to a successful merger is careful planning and coordination ahead of the migration. This ensures compatibility while minimizing operational disruptions.
Large companies also can introduce another layer of complexity. Typically, companies come to mergers or acquisitions with substantial user bases and all the accounts, groups, and permissions that come with those users. Careful planning is required to preserve access rights and permissions post-migration. This means making a thorough analysis of the environments and mapping the migration in detail to prevent data loss or the introduction of security vulnerabilities.
Security and compliance must be priorities during any AD migration. AD is the central point for managing and enforcing security policies, access controls, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Pre-migration, companies must be certain that security policies will be uniform and consistently enforced across the new environment. This will help mitigate data loss, security risks, and operational disruptions.
One of the biggest challenges of AD migration is keeping business operations running smoothly. This is why planning migration schedules, prioritizing critical systems and applications, and implementing rollback procedures are so important. These will help ensure minimal downtime during the migration and help keep data secure throughout the process.
Since AD migrations involve the movement of vast amounts of sensitive data, it’s essential that companies plan, test, and validate procedures before the migration. Otherwise, sensitive information such as user accounts, passwords, group memberships, and access controls are at risk.
Driving M&A Success
As M&A markets heat up in 2024, it’s important to remember the central role AD migrations play. All successful mergers and acquisitions rely on the seamless consolidation of user accounts and the enforcement of well-designed security policies. A smooth AD migration means continual resource access, mitigated risks, and improved operational efficiency both before and after the merger.
By Shane Daugherty, Technical Services Specialist Team Manager at BitTitan