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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.