Accelerating M&A Integration Success & Savings with Centralized Backup Monitoring

In the afterglow of a corporate M&A (mergers & acquisitions) announcement, there’s often excitement in the air around new business possibilities that have been brought into play.

Among the IT teams responsible for data protection and backup operations, however, that excitement often quickly subsides – and is replaced by the enormity of a looming mission: integrating the IT environments while ensuring data oversight and protection.

The urgency in the IT integration mission is not just critical; it’s also non-negotiable.

Cybercriminals are not likely to grant your organization a reprieve simply because you’re knee-deep in integration activities. Executives overseeing the integration typically expect IT integration work to conclude in months, not years, so the cost savings can begin.

How is an enterprise data protection team to bring order to its newly expanded data environment in time to meet internal and external expectations and protect against serious data loss scenarios?

Why M&A is Inherently Complicated for Data Protection & Backup Teams 

A corporate acquisition can quickly add a lot of complexity to an organization’s data environment. 

One of Bocada’s enterprise clients had already been using three public cloud services and backing up data across six different backup products prior to entering the M&A process. Upon closing its acquisition of a competitor, the organization quickly found itself integrating and reconciling against many more net-new assets: an additional cloud environment, four net new backup products, and a myriad of other software and hardware products. 

This scenario is common during and even following the M&A process across industries, and it represents a whole lot of chaos hitting IT teams that can often be understaffed and ill-equipped to take on additional complexity. 

What’s more, the public spectacle of an acquisition can paint a big target on both the acquirer and acquiree for cybercriminals, who are drawn to the scene like sharks to chum. 

According to a Forescout Technologies survey of companies going through M&A, 53% of respondents experienced a data breach or cybersecurity incident during the M&A process, with most attributing the incidents to poor cybersecurity practices or unidentified vulnerabilities in the acquired company’s infrastructure. 

Closing the data oversight gap quickly is paramount to keeping any newly expanded organization protected when it could be particularly vulnerable. 

Centralized Backup Monitoring Paves a Path for Rapid Integration of Acquired Backup Operations 

We’ve established the gravity of the data oversight mission following an acquisition; it’s urgent and the risk of catastrophic data loss is heightened. 

There’s good news, though.  

Centralized backup monitoring can provide a unified monitoring and reporting dashboard for even the most disparate environments: multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, on-prem, or otherwise.  

By gaining immediate oversight of the acquired backup environment alongside the existing environment, IT teams can easily maintain business continuity while they make strategic integration decisions. They also retain the strategic option to keep the expanded tech stack in place long term, thanks to the unified monitoring. 

Purpose-built for enterprise teams and global MSPs, Bocada’s automated and agentless backup monitoring platform collects data directly from more than 40+ popular backup products, providing not just a 360-degree view of the entire backup environment but also the ability to drill down into specific backup failures, storage utilization, and other actionable data. Bocada also automatically discovers unprotected assets (where there is no backup process in play), to help ensure comprehensive protection and asset reconciliation. 

Using Bocada, IT teams can quickly identify issues and remediate them with issue ticketing automation, addressing problems before data loss occurs.

Regardless of the data loss vector – cyberthreat, hardware/software failures, or acts of God – centralized backup monitoring makes it possible for IT teams to bring order to even the most complex backup environments, enabling 99%+ backup success rates and keeping critical data protected. 

Understanding the Value of Centralized Backup Monitoring in M&A 

Adding centralized backup monitoring like Bocada’s creates value for an acquiring enterprise company in several ways: 

• Free up resources. Centralized backup monitoring significantly reduces the amount of manual work required to maintain oversight of a complex data environment. The typical Bocada client saves 4-6 man hours per day on manual backup reporting and compliance-related work. Those productivity gains are especially valuable when IT teams are strapped for time and resources, as they often are following a corporate acquisition. 

• Maintain business continuity. By using an overarching (i.e. heterogeneous) monitoring platform like Bocada, IT teams no longer need to perform hasty “lift and shift” or complex application migrations to maintain business continuity in the integration process. Bocada instantly unifies backup reporting across new and existing backup products and data assets, granting immediate and comprehensive oversight of the expanded backup environment. 

• Reduce risk. Centralized backup monitoring allows enterprise organizations to quickly gain compliance with internal and external data protection requirements, which exist to protect organizations (and their customers) from catastrophic data loss. Implementing centralized backup monitoring helps organizations quickly protect their data in a period of heightened vulnerability. Avoid regulatory penalties and protect against reputational loss, customer churn, and other negative consequences of data breaches. 

Bring Order to the Chaos 

Corporate M&A activity presents challenges for IT teams that find themselves on the hook to perform asset reconciliation and achieve data resiliency in what is often a frantic time. Heightened vulnerability and the general chaos of post-M&A integration work make it especially critical for these teams to bring order to their expanded backup environment.  

For many enterprise teams, centralized backup monitoring represents the optimal path to meeting data oversight requirements and protecting critical data while freeing up technical resources for higher-value work.  

About Bocada 

Bocada LLC, a global IT Automation leader, delivers backup reporting and monitoring solutions that give enterprises complete visibility into their backup performance. Bocada provides insight into complex backup environments, enabling IT organizations to save time, automate ongoing reporting activities, and reduce costs. With the largest installed customer base in the Fortune 500, Bocada is the world’s leading provider of backup reporting automation. For more information, visit www.bocada.com or contact us.