Merger and Acquisition Migration: Why Choose CloudFuze?
For a lot of companies, merger and acquisition migrations are the key to establishing synergies that live up to the results anticipated through the merger or acquisition deal. However, planning and performing M&A migrations is often more challenging than regular migrations simply due to the fact that it has to be a balancing act of combining the workforce of two separate companies.
To navigate the complexities and challenges, partnering with a migration service provider that has proven expertise in M&A migrations is the way to go. At CloudFuze, we have developed industry-leading expertise in helping companies migrate during mergers and acquisitions over the years.
Why Choose CloudFuze for M&A Migrations?
As one of the leading cloud office migration service providers focused on offering one-stop-shop solutions, we at CloudFuze, have the insights and experience in enabling businesses to migrate in sync with their M&A journey. Through granular and bespoke approaches, we ensure that your organization can maximize the value out of the merger or acquisition deal.
Explore some of the high-level points on why and how CloudFuze can be your ideal migration partner for your company’s merger and acquisition migration.
1. A Track Record of Performing M&A Migrations for Large Enterprises
We have helped some of the largest, world-renowned organizations, such as Intuit and Stryker, migrate for their merger and acquisition use cases. Our migration team deeply understood their M&A use case and helped plan the migration in strategic ways.
By ensuring proper SOW planning, timeline planning, user batch segregation, migration validation, and merger and acquisition change management, we have helped Intuit, Stryker, and other large-sized companies migrate successfully.
2. Framing a Tailored Merger and Acquisition Migration Roadmap
A big part of what makes us an industry expert in creating M&A migration success stories is our strategic approach toward roadmap planning. We avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and focus on every M&A-related migration requirement with a tailored approach.
With more than a decade of migration experience, we have gained insight into framing migration roadmaps that are specific to mergers and acquisitions. Connect with our migration team to further understand how we can help you plan a migration roadmap and timeline that adjusts to your organization’s M&A journey.
3. Establishing Proper Communication to Avoid Silos
Proper communication is the key to making any migration project successful. It is more important in migrations for mergers and acquisitions as two different companies are involved in the project. With a three-way communication system between the parent company, the merging/acquired company, and the migration vendor (e.g., CloudFuze), we ensure that there are no communication gaps, which, otherwise, can raise the risk of loopholes that can result in performance and security compromises.
4. Streamlining Change Management
Change management cannot be an afterthought, especially during M&A migrations, as proper syncing with the parent company post-M&A and migration is a must. As part of offering comprehensive migration solutions, we help businesses plan their migration with change management as a priority right from the initial phases of the project. This way, your company and IT team can ensure that the end-users do not get impacted by the significant transition.
Merger and Acquisition Migration Roadmap
As it is with all types of migration, it’s a must to have a proper migration roadmap for your company’s upcoming merger or acquisition. Your team can take insights from the approaches we have shared below and implement them into planning the merger and acquisition migration roadmap:
Pre-Migration Planning
The best way to tackle any merger or acquisition-led migration, regardless of the size and complexity, is to ensure proper pre-migration planning. It helps lay a solid groundwork for your team to undertake the migration flawlessly.
1. Pre-Migration Analysis
Perform an in-depth analysis of the source cloud, from where users and data are to be moved away. Taking this step helps your team understand the source cloud better and plan a well-informed migration scope accordingly.
2. Preparing the Scope of Work
In most M&A migration scenarios, the scope of work is use case-driven; the merger or the acquisition itself helps determine the scope of migration in terms of the:
- User accounts to migrate
- Data to migrate
- Metadata to preserve
- The hierarchal structure to preserve
M&A Migration Preparation
Proper preparation is equally important to ensure your company is all set for the M&A-led cloud transition. Proper preparation helps lower downtime risks, which, otherwise, can impact the merger or acquisition or extend its timeline.
1. User Mapping
Accurate user mapping is a must when it comes to ensuring success for data migrations during a merger or acquisition. It is best to use the CSV mapping approach to ensure 100% accuracy in mapping. CSV mapping also provides flexibility in mapping source cloud users to specific drives, libraries, and groups of the target cloud(s).
2. Admin Login Details
Ensure that your team is ready with the admin login details of both the source and target clouds. This will help streamline the cloud authentication process and help eliminate delays.
3. Data Backup
As part of safeguarding the entire M&A project, we recommend taking additional backup of the source cloud data. It can help in recovery in case of unanticipated disruptions.
Migration Initiation
Initiating the merger and acquisition migration strategically and in stages will help ensure smooth progress and completion. Check out the best practices below:
1. One-Time Migration
The industry-standard best practice is to perform one-time migrations first. Depending on the user batches you have created, perform the one-time migration of the first batch and then move to other batches.
2. One-Time Migration Validation
One of the exclusive best practices we recommend is to validate each user batch’s one-time migration as and when it gets completed. Many businesses take an alternative route of validating all the users at once. This approach creates complexities; the bigger the data sets to validate, the higher the margins of error.
3. Delta Migration
After one-time migration completion, make sure to perform the delta migration promptly to bring all the incremental changes over to the target cloud. The more the delta migration gets delayed, the larger the incremental changes can become.
4. Delta Migration Validation
Perform extensive validation of the delta migration to ensure all the incremental changes have been accurately migrated to the target cloud.
Post-Migration Activities
After the one-time and delta migration gets completed, it’s important to complete several post-migration steps. Check them out below:
1. Post-Migration Integration
Strategic post-migration integration is critical for data migrations during mergers or acquisitions as the users and data of company A needs to be synced with company B.
2. User Onboarding
User onboarding needs to be in sync with the completion of the merger or acquisition process. Prior training helps streamline the process of onboarding users to the target cloud.
3. Go-Live
After official press releases and other public announcements about the merger or acquisition, your teams can go live and start using the target cloud.
