Learn how identity and access management (IAM) is a critical enabler for smooth, secure replatforming and M&A.
If you are replatforming on the cloud or looking to enhance your appeal as an acquisition target, identity and access management (IAM) should be at the heart of your strategy. Successfully replatforming, whether as part of post-M&A integration or a broader digital transformation strategy to improve scalability, security, experience, and performance, is easier and more effective when you have a specific plan for managing identity.
What does replatforming involve?
Replatforming entails changing and updating specific components of an application to allow it to function in the cloud and benefit from the resulting improvements in experience, scalability, security, and efficiency. As more organizations take advantage of cloud-native identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) platforms designed with agility and transparency in mind, updating your application allows you to take advantage of modern features like social login, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and single sign-on (SSO).
Implementing social login can increase conversions and improve customer experience because end-users can create an account and start accessing your services within seconds. MFA is increasingly considered an essential cybersecurity feature. Entrusting identity to an IDaaS provider can also reduce the maintenance costs of updating protocols to ensure compliance with GDPR and other data privacy laws.
How does IAM come in?
Naturally, both M&As and replatforming journeys demand a huge amount of advance planning. Decision-makers need to consider which systems to keep and which to jettison. They have to decide which business functions to integrate into their tech stack and how. And, in the case of M&As, they need to manage the expanded pool of user data that results from a deal without exposing security vulnerabilities, creating friction that drives users away, or roadblocking business goals. IAM empowers companies to accomplish all this with minimal disruption to business processes and end-user experience.
In this post, we’ll explore why IAM is a critical step in your migration journey, no matter what shape that journey takes.
The Value of IAM for Replatforming
Deliver a superior experience
The ultimate goal of an M&A or a cloud migration is to deliver more value to customers. But if your migration is so painful that your customers abandon you for another service, your digital transformation won’t succeed. Because signup and login are integral elements of the customer experience, an IAM solution is a necessary ingredient in eliminating friction.
Every time you lose a customer due to a messy M&A integration or a clumsy cloud migration, your organization loses value. That’s why it’s so crucial to deliver a frictionless customer experience during your M&A integration or while you’re replatforming.
Ensure a smooth migration
As many as 70–90% of M&As fail, often because there’s no clear identity integration process in place. If you’re interested in making an M&A deal, you need to demonstrate to your new partner that you can integrate your operations with theirs quickly and easily without compromising on security. The best way to do that is to weave IAM into the fabric of your M&A strategy.
The same logic applies to replatforming in the cloud. If you start migrating without a coherent identity strategy, you’ll end up with a heap of usability problems for your teams, your vendors and partners, and your customers.
Having an IAM solution in place before a merger or acquisition keeps you from spending months integrating applications rather than focusing on value creation. During the merging/onboarding period, your teams still need to get their work done. A centralized identity strategy goes a long way toward minimizing the disruption.
Managing post-M&A integration in-house is a hard, resource-heavy job. Identity is a highly specialized and rapidly evolving field, and your developers shouldn’t have to become security experts for you to achieve a smooth integration. IAM allows developers to focus on adding value to their own solutions rather than reinventing the identity wheel.
