2022 has seen a significant global economic downturn that’s been fueled by a variety of factors including: Russia-Ukraine war, rising levels of inflation, volatility / instability in the financial markets, supply chain issues, and companies not fully recovering to pre-pandemic levels. This downturn presents an opportunity for disruption in the market and for certain companies (e.g. large corporates), merger & acquisition activity becomes a great way to acquire assets for lower than expected prices.
However these integration opportunities also introduce opportunities for bad actors to exploit vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity and data vulnerability issues often arise after the announcement of any inorganic transaction, as bad actors look to capitalize during this ambiguous time of transition, when employees are especially vulnerable. Governments are considering, pursuing, or starting to enforce new rules and regulations that would require companies to not only report these cyber incidents but also make it a crime to pay ransomware.
Since less than 10% deals globally complete a cyber security due diligence before completing a deal, companies are left with managing risks including:
- Unknown inventory (e.g. laptops, devices)
- Potential compromised assets
- Providing 3rd party access
- Prevent loss of intellectual property (esp. during merger)
- Protecting the Parent company from unknown and undiscovered threats stemming from the acquisition
70% of deals fail to achieve the intended value advantage due directly, or in part, to the risk of achieving deal synergies that are often plagued by cyber risk and low-value tech integration timelines. Traditional integration involves extending your perimeter network via temporary VPNs (which increase your attack surface) and backhauling traffic to a few data centers. Backhauling traffic makes things slow and impacts user productivity efforts and often result in partially integrated businesses in a complex patchwork of systems containing security blind-spots and vulnerabilities.
Zero Trust Approach
Zscaler’s Zero Trust approach provides you the ability to eliminate 80% of the cyber risks during an M&A as you are never on the network and can now quickly identify, analyze, and mitigate cyberthreats before they break through your defenses. The Zscaler platform enables IT/Security operations to securely connect any device, application, or user no matter where they work, travel to, or connect from. The platform, which is fully operational in days, allows you to quickly:
- Protect the enterprise from known and evolving cyber threats and insider risk with a simple-to-operate, scalable cloud platform
- Transform the M&A IT playbook from a program of complex projects dedicated to network engineering, end user & identity management, and precursor IT standardization into a streamlined set of simpler onboarding processes.
- Remove barriers to action, allowing organizations to value-capture synergies sooner
Zscaler is the modern way to integrate.
The immediate ability to share processes and data without disruption from anywhere is a compelling differentiator. Zscaler’s simplicity gets integrations done in far less time, and does so with little user disruption, lower cost, and reduced risk. Zscaler allows organizations to quickly begin value-capture activities while increasing the volume of inorganic transactions (i.e. M&A). You can contact us for a demo today and read more in our whitepaper.
