Avoid the Headaches and Costs of AD Domain Consolidation

For any company, M&As are a huge transition that greatly affects all levels of your team, from your financial department to HR. As more companies become technology companies, M&As have an even bigger impact on IT, with everything from identity management to your Active Directory infrastructure, to your IT security impacted by huge systemic changes. It can be a long, drawn-out process before your company can find its feet again to start walking. 

But what if we told you that it doesn’t have to be complicated?

Okta eliminates the costs and headaches of AD domain consolidation during M&As, allowing you to smoothly integrate users across different organizations and give them access to the tools they need.

This whitepaper shares how a range of renowned companies – from News Corp to National Geographic – have benefited from our cloud-based services during such transitions, and more importantly, how you can too.

It’s no secret that mergers and acquisitions have become a prominent corporate strategy, providing a way for companies to access new markets, technology, and resources faster than they could through their own internal efforts. But when every company is becoming a technology company, it becomes inherently more complex to combine unique technology stacks. No longer is it just about ensuring an organizational fit between the parent company and its subsidiary, nor matching corporate cultures and processes. It’s also about merging administrative systems effectively and migrating legacy on-premises systems to the cloud.

In particular, what we see time and again are the headaches—and costs—caused by AD domain consolidation during M&As. It can often take weeks (even months) of effort from multiple IT teams to manage these transitions, and risks abound during the process: end users don’t have access to the tools or resources they need; the company’s security posture is at stake when it’s reliant on the security of its weakest link. Not only is there often a lack of trust established between these disparate user stores, it also becomes a challenge to align local IT operations with those managed by the centralized head office IT team.

The result is that time-strapped teams often look for help in the wrong places—expensive consultants, complicated migration tools, overpriced security reviews, or hours and hours of invested effort by team members whose time could be better spent elsewhere.

There’s a better way. Okta provides a central identity management system to integrate users across different organizations. This allows you to transform your technology stack, create flexible autonomy and efficiency for shared sources, improve performance for end users, and provide oversight and visibility for your teams. The result? An M&A process that’s both repeatable and effic