“According to a study, more than a third (40%) of acquiring organizations involved in a merger and acquisition transaction detected a cybersecurity vulnerability during the acquired company’s post-acquisition integration process”
Any successful business relies on all digital assets, including network systems, data, and a strong data security system where their data can be stored and secured. Since modern companies rely so heavily on digital documents, they are more vulnerable to security breaches.
Data leaks are a constant source of concern for M&A executives. Unnecessary exposure or other potential deal-breaking blunders are unwelcome when it comes to any kind of M&A deal. Many common M&A software tools used for storing and sharing confidential information about deals, both internally and externally, are highly vulnerable to data leaks.
In mergers and acquisitions, data privacy, cybersecurity, and data breach threats are all-essential due diligence considerations. The discovery of security issues and even notifiable breaches post-acquisition is a quite common scenario.
According to a study, more than a third (40%) of acquiring organizations involved in a merger and acquisition transaction detected a cybersecurity vulnerability during the acquired company’s post-acquisition integration process. Verizon’s revelation of a past data breach at Yahoo! after signing a deal was the most well-publicized example of an M&A-related cybersecurity vulnerability.
Data breach is a serious matter, especially when it concerns sensitive customer information or intellectual property. If you are the buyer, you should make it an important point to find out whether there has been a security breach before you close the purchase. What about the vulnerabilities in your organization? There are techniques to mitigate security concerns on your end during M&A due diligence. There are various kinds of issues, dangers, and financial information that need to be safeguarded during an M&A deal. This article walks you through the best data integration methods for a successful M&A process so that you can avoid common problems, protect consumer data, and understand how to handle your data at every stage.
Discover and Document all your data
Companies that merge or acquire enterprise data may find that the amount of data they process increases rapidly over time. For a successful M&A initiative, it is necessary to find and categorize fresh data, classify data by its purpose, locate dark data, and locate crown jewel data according to their purpose.
MergerWare’s unrivaled data coverage allows businesses to see all their data, including unstructured, structured, semi-structured, big data, data in motion, data centers, the cloud, and apps. Companies may use MergerWare to find, manage, and catalog all their sensitive data across a consolidated (and siloed) landscape, as well as apply policy across it.
Explore and utilize ML Based classification
Businesses must know what consumer information they have, why they have it, and what legal reasons it serves when merging data. Traditional data categorization methods are only capable of finding dark data, identifying potentially sensitive material, and inferring relationships across data assets because they rely solely on regular expression and pattern matching.
MergerWare uses machine learning to classify regulated and sensitive data then drills down to add context and uncovers associations based on identity, location, sensitivity, policy, and more. Custom classifiers can be created to tag data according to unique business requirements, ensuring proper handling and reporting.
Clean up and minimize data
Not all data is created equal, and data that was critical to the operation of a company before a merger can become a liability after the merger. Duplicate and duplicate data increases the risk of data breaches, complicates and jeopardizes cloud migration initiatives, and frequently violates privacy laws.
Identify and repair duplicate, near-duplicate, similar, redundant, and derivative versions of personal and sensitive information in such a scenario. Applying policies, automating procedures, and managing violations for all data kinds and sources using policy-driven retention management can be another way to deal with this sort of problem.
Reduce risk by improving data quality
Managing data from a variety of sources, each with its own set of irregularities and inaccuracies, exposes sensitive and vulnerable data to unnecessary danger. MergerWare helps businesses enhance data quality by constantly checking for consistency, accuracy, completeness, and validity of data, as well as ensuring that it is fit for purpose and compliance. It also helps in verifying data quality using data profiling results and examine the results in a unified catalog view.
Achieve regulatory compliance
Companies must comply with an increasing number of rules, ranging from the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — as well as industry-specific rules like SOX, GLBA, and HIPAA — to ensure that sensitive, personal, financial, and health data is protected. Businesses that combine their data must be able to justify the data they acquire, utilize, and handle, especially when it comes to sensitive, personal, and regulated information.
MergerWare, through its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure), supports a vast array of compliance programs and adheres to the highest security and data protection standards available. It ensures security at all key points of the transaction as well as ensuring network, storage, host and operating system security.
MergerWare- your one-stop solution for monitoring all deal risks
MergerWare provides a comprehensive M&A playbook defining all key actions starting from pre-deal phase, due-diligence, Day-1, and subsequent phases of deal integration.
All rules of engagement between buyer and seller organization, legal do’s & don’t activities to avoid, acceptable activities before the merger are part of the playbook guiding principles that help the legal team avoid any critical mistake. Data protection, cybersecurity critical assessment, and reporting are also embedded within the platform.
As M&A professionals, we understand the importance of data security and maintaining the confidentiality of information in an M&A context. This key factor is incorporated into the way we have designed and built our entire platform. Do you want to go for an end-to-end M&A process that is not only effective and streamlined but also adheres to all the applicable regulations?
Visit mergerware.com and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to learn more.
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