How Microsoft 365 Can Help Merger, Acquisition, and Divestiture Scenarios

Companies often use merger and acquisition scenarios as a means of expanding their operations. When it comes to growth, leveraging the strengths of other companies can be a game-changer. The question is, how do you make sure that those strengths get used as rapidly as possible?

The power of Microsoft 365 can aid in merger and acquisition scenarios by ensuring greater collaboration and efficiency across the organizations.

Microsoft 365: The Ideal Solution for Mergers and Acquisitions

During and after a merger or acquisition, Microsoft 365 can provide users with a suite of applications that improves their ability to work together and increase productivity. Before going right into M&As with Microsoft 365, here are a few things to think about to make sure your Microsoft 365 M&A operations go off without a hitch:

Several Tenants Add Complexity to Mergers

When several Microsoft 365 tenants are involved, the migration and business process integration portions of M&A transactions can become quite complicated.

Of course, technical considerations will play a role, but so will law, compliance, support, communications, data sovereignty, and timetable concerns. A good rule of thumb is that migration operations will increase in complexity as the size and technical maturity of the organization increase.

Always Intricately Plan Every Aspect of Your M&As

The age-old saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” must be applied to Microsoft 365 migration and integration operations triggered by M&As.
Agility means assessing, planning, validating, and executing while continuously monitoring and responding to changes, especially in huge, complicated migration and integration projects. You should include the following components in any comprehensive strategy for dealing with the complexity of M&A transactions:

• Evaluation of the Integration Readiness of the Organization
• Environmental Baseline Assessment for planning migration and integration
• Collaboration between departments to better serve end users
• Integration of Corporate Communication Efforts
• Prioritization of migration and integration problems
• Verification and validation of transferred data

Microsoft 365 M&As Require Customization

You can glean a thorough picture of the work needed to accomplish M&As from an appreciation of the complexity of M&A integrations of Microsoft 365 and careful planning in advance.

The requirement for customization and automation in M&A-based migrations or integrations is necessary to guarantee achieving M&A timelines, compliance, or other criteria. While there is no doubt that modern migration technologies provide excellent functionality in this area, it is also quite probable that you will require customization or automation in some form.

8 Tips to Ensure Success when Using Microsoft 365 in M&As

When merging with another firm and using Microsoft 365 as a common ground for information storage, management, and collaboration, always follow these 8 tips to ensure success:

• Involve IT Early on in Merger and Acquisition Planning

The success of data migration during mergers and acquisitions depends heavily on how early IT is involved in the integration process. There needs to be early involvement from IT so that everyone is on the same page on the scope of the information integration project.

Choosing the correct migration tool that can transfer large amounts of data to Microsoft 365 without any interruption is a difficult enough task. But, IT also needs to enable metadata and permissions migration to Microsoft 365. To accomplish this, IT needs ample notice about upcoming mergers and acquisitions.

• Get the Environment of the Destination Ready

Data migration projects resulting from a merger or acquisition must begin with careful preparation of the target environment. Creating and provisioning user accounts with exact aliases is the most important part of configuring the Microsoft 365 environment.

• Figure Out What Static Data is No Longer Useful

Data transfer can be costly and time-consuming during a merger or acquisition. However, IT departments can save time and money by determining which records are no longer needed and removing, retiring, or archiving them.

It is much easier for IT teams to distinguish live data from static data if they perform an analysis on the complete source data set. Excluding static data from the data migration scope might save migration time and expense if the data is no longer required.

• Modify the Data Migration to Include Automated Procedures

Data migration from mergers and acquisitions might be time-consuming to OneDrive and SharePoint due to variables including Microsoft 365’s limits. IT departments can save time and energy by implementing automated processes that provide workarounds for these constraints.

• Avoid Data or Information Silos

  There is a greater potential for data or information siloing during a merger or acquisition data migration than during a typical migration. By creating separate SharePoint Online Sites for each division, you can avoid data silos throughout the migration to Microsoft 365.

• Reduce the Risk of Transfer Rate Throttling
  

  Transferring large amounts of data and user accounts is common during mergers and acquisitions. There is also the possibility of API throttling when moving large amounts of content. The API of the cloud interacting with the data could get throttled if a lot of data and user accounts interact with the cloud in a short timeframe.

  Businesses can reduce the possibility of API throttling by anticipating the daily volume of data migration. The best action is to collaborate with the migration vendor and plan the appropriate daily data transfer volume.

• Identify and Fix Conflicting Files

  As with any migration, files may become incompatible during a merger or acquisition data movement. The potential for data silos to form increases further when files become in dispute with one another. Businesses should have procedures to reduce the likelihood of file conflicts and address them quickly so that the entire transfer is not slowed down.

• Remove Data Associated with Physical Servers

  Mergers and acquisitions are most successful when companies eliminate expensive legacy or on-premises systems. However, in many circumstances, decommissioning them quickly is not possible. Data associated with on-premises systems should get excluded from the pre-migration examination conducted by merging or acquiring companies. This exclusion aids in ensuring that the I/O throughput of the data connected to the on-premises systems cannot get impacted.

Conclusion

While most C-suite executives are now aware of the cloud’s advantages — namely, its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and safety — Microsoft 365 and other cloud services are becoming increasingly important in mergers and acquisitions. In the end, although mergers and acquisitions involving large organizations can be challenging, you can facilitate them by integrating Microsoft 365 with on-premises Microsoft workloads.