Partner POV | Mergers & Acquisitions at the Speed of Business with Zero Trust

This article was created and contributed by our partner, Zscaler.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are an effective way for organizations to capture competitive advantage from market changes. Naturally, the quicker, the better—but the complexities and risks of integrating disparate technical landscapes, combined with logistical and geographical challenges, leaves many organizations uncertain how to grasp that advantage, and especially how to do it quickly. 

Harvard Business Review notes that 70–90% of deals fail to achieve the intended value and advantage directly (or in part) due to and low-value tech integration timelines.1 These risks take many forms: data breaches driving financial penalties and brand erosion, cost overrun when unforeseen technical complexities or vulnerable environments are acquired, and many more. Each risk can further compound missed advantages by extending value capture timelines, forcing unplanned separation of key talent, and eroding user collaboration and productivity potential. 

Competitive advantage comes not with the ability to execute, but to execute at speed. Traditional approaches to M&A IT are not safe or efficient enough to enable that advantage. These slow, complex approaches have proven to meet that need only 30%2 of the time. In fact, traditional methods present a high risk of derailing potential advantage into an overt loss because of more nimble players on the field—some competitive, some malicious.

The sanctity and speed of integration outcomes are essential to gaining competitive advantage. Cloud technologies, the zero trust approach to accessibility and accountability, and the digitized manner to execute are the enabling vectors that allow M&A to move quickly while keeping a clear line of sight on complete execution. 

To elevate the way you integrate, you need to take a modern approach: 
 

• Transform the M&A IT playbook from a program of complex network engineering, end user and ID management, and precursor IT standardization projects into a set of streamlined onboarding processes. 
• Reduce IT integration challenges by prioritizing the users and systems that need to be integrated first, and those that can wait. 
• Enable business-led value capture opportunities to move forward earlier by overlaying IT's network and infrastructure complexities. 
• Decouple IT standardization timelines from the integration agenda to allow your business to enjoy the same nimbleness that threatens it.

Modern integrations 

Zscaler offers a cloud-delivered platform that enables speed to value in M&A by simplifying IT integration, providing a more secure, less costly, and less complex path forward. The Zscaler zero trust approach lets you capture value faster by helping you integrate only what is needed, or at least prioritize what is needed. This gives you unprecedented flexibility in articulating to IT which aspects of integration will best drive competitive advantage—and when, if at all. 

The Zscaler zero trust approach revolutionizes your M&A playbook with a new integration architecture, empowering IT to go beyond simply facilitating your business and begin driving real business value.

Let's compare the steps of a traditional approach to those of the modern Zscaler approach.

Traditional Approach vs Zscaler Approach

Speed to value 

Zscaler's platform connects users, devices, applications, and workloads through the globally distributed, cloud-delivered Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform. Acquired employees can be up and running with access to applications in a matter of days while enjoying a seamless user experience that maintains the speed and flow of the acquired business. 

What usually took 9 to 12 months of complex planning and execution with people and hardware, Zscaler enables you to do as part of a simple process of software deployment and administration in a lean, standardized manner with a fraction of the effort.

We built the Zero Trust Exchange platform for scale, performance, and flexibility. With it, your organization can assume, federate, or transform an acquired security landscape without capital investment, technical complexities, or the typical technical interoperability challenges. 

Instead of replacing an acquired organization's technology to meet Day 1 requirements, the unique architecture of the Zero Trust Exchange overlays the ecosystem. This way, you can standardize and optimize the IT landscape in parallel, reducing the potential impact on your integration and value capture timeline. Taking advantage of a platform with among the most vendor integrations on the market, you'll be able to deploy beneficial use cases even faster. 

The same nimbleness Zscaler brings to your business integrations extends to managing new end user personas. Bring collaborative groups together without impacting their ability to work, no matter where they connect, easily bringing speed to synergy potentials such as site closures. 

Managed risk 

The Zero Trust Exchange prepares you for the unpredictable by lowering cyber risk by as much as 85%. Add the platform as a next hop for any internet-bound traffic, and you can rest assured that any web-based cyberthreats (e.g., command and control, data payloads, attempts to access malicious sites or content) are mitigated and documented. 

The platform protects users and server traffic from internet threats and provides detailed auditing of who, where, and what, including all activities being allowed or blocked. The unique architecture of the Zero Trust Exchange never connects networks and never puts acquired users or network-connected resources onto the buyer's network. When you uncover threats, you can easily run remediation and integration efforts in parallel—the Zscaler platform provides zero trust segmentation between acquired and buyer assets, ensuring secure, appropriate access across organizations. You can now focus on collaboration and productivity right away, rather than only after remediation is complete. 

The Zero Trust Exchange protects against data leakage as well. Full traffic inspection to protect data requires no additional architecture or deployments—just defining and enabling your data policies. The risk of intellectual property theft is often highest during integration due to a lack of complete controls, and based on your needs, you can easily toggle full inspection on or off.

Simplicity 

Visibility is critical to keep your users, devices, and workloads safe. The Zero Trust Exchange provides an intuitive management dashboard and unprecedented visibility into devices, traffic, and access. Comprehensive telemetry, augmented with our proprietary AI/ML engines, provides simple, clear recommendations and automated policy creation to support initial deployment as well as ongoing maintenance. 

Delivered globally as a cloud service, your Zero Trust Exchange deployment is operable with minimal resources (often two or three full-time engineers, inclusive of support redundancies). You'll never need to engineer, build, or maintain the service itself, just manage or administer the platform as you see fit for your business requirements. This way, you're free to focus resources on more valuable ventures to ensure deal value is achieved on time.

The Zscaler control plane allows for a complete auditable, accountable framework that can support organizational, vendor, and governmental regulations and policies for any pending audits once the integration/deal is complete.

Velocity 

Zscaler eliminates many time-consuming and complex technical integration challenges, projects, and costs. By streamlining integration timelines and decoupling the IT standardization timeline, our platform consistently drives down time-to-value by over 50%. Moreover, you can easily turn many integration projects into simple, highly repeatable user/site onboarding processes. On top of that, adopting the Zero Trust Exchange across your enterprise gives you the flexibility to rationalize and consolidate vendors and capabilities, which can significantly reduce recurring and one-time costs. 

The sum of these benefits supports growth and cost savings across your organization and—especially in the case of M&A—can directly support your ability to confidently pursue, execute, and achieve value in more transactions.