Merger & Acquisition
Protect your Digital Core
Joint ventures (JVs), mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures often entail the use of shared systems where data segregation is crucial. These systems contain sensitive information that underpin competitive strategies, critical initiatives, and compliance measures. Inadequate handling or merging of this data can lead to breaches of partnership agreements, loss of IP, leakage of confidential information, and regulatory non-compliance. Effective data segregation is not just a technical necessity, but a strategic imperative to safeguard business integrity.Â
Safeguarding Data in Joint Ventures, Mergers & Acquisitions, Divestitures, and Sanctions
Explore the challenges faced by joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and companies under sanctions when it comes to safeguarding data during structural changes
Audit and Compliance
Mitigate risk and simplify compliance with comprehensive visibility into the location, use and distribution of material, nonpublic private, and PII
NextLabs Rights Protection Tool
Discover how companies ensure secure, compliant data access by classifying and encrypting data, enabling the definition of policies based on data classifications
Challenges
Data Sharing and Consolidation
During JVs, a primary hurdle is the need to effectively share data between partners while ensuring the protection of sensitive information such as IP. This balancing act is essential to reduce the time and costs involved in establishing and maintaining disparate systems. On the other hand, M&As feature the challenge of securely managing data consolidation processes, to prevent data privacy breaches that could damage investor, stakeholder, and public trust.Â
Data Segregation Requirements
During divestitures, it is crucial to maintain a separation of data and employees between the spinoff and the parent company. This involves implementing controls on the systems, assets, and data of the soon-to-be divested organization to avoid confidential information from being viewed. Failure to segregate data can result in collusion and anticompetitive behavior, antitrust lawsuits, and noncompliance.Â
Complex Change Management
Traditional change management strategies often fall short when handling the complexities of larger-scale mergers, since manually integrating data from an acquired company into the parent company’s systems can be a time-intensive process fraught with errors. IBM reported that one in three executives surveyed has experienced data breaches that can be attributed to M&A activity during integration, which calls for automation.
Safeguarding Data during JVs, M&As and Divestiture
To overcome the challenges surrounding data sharing, data segregation, and integrating data acquisitions during joint ventures, M&A, and divestitures, organizations need to implement data segregation controls and strict access controls to prevent unauthorized access. A proactive approach to data security must contain the following elements:Â
- Centralized Policy Platform with 4GL Policy Language ​
An intuitive centralized policy management system using a 4GL policy language with a point-and-click GUI enables even non-technical users to easily create, manage, and maintain policies. This system simplifies governance by allowing administrators to define user permissions and enforce a system of checks and balances across the policy lifecycle. It supports effective lifecycle management, delegated administration, segregation of duties through Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), and continuous audits, ensuring policies are both current and secure.
- Data-Centric Security Enforcement ​
To implement “need-to-know” access and ensure compliance, organizations can implement policies that incorporate dynamic field-level data masking and record-level data segregation. Dynamic data masking conceals original data with altered content, allowing only authorized users access to sensitive fields. Unauthorized users see only masked values, determined by predefined patterns in the policy. Additionally, data segregation filters access based on user attributes such as industry, location, or department, effectively shielding sensitive information from unauthorized access.Â
- Automate & Prevent ​
Scaling change management for future processes requires automation. Dynamically enforcing security policies at time of access request allows companies to automate data security during M&As, JVs and divestitures, preventing breaches before they happen. With automation, organizations can streamline the adaptation of policies in real-time, enhancing responsiveness to new threats and regulatory changes.
- Centralized Monitoring​
For companies undergoing changes to their organizational structures, it is essential to streamline the audit and monitoring process. Auditing and monitoring are crucial components of regulatory compliance, as they assess the adequacy and effectiveness of internal controls. Centralizing data storage simplifies the identification of high-risk areas. Consequently, organizations can conduct risk assessments more efficiently, identify compliance gaps, and mitigate potential risks before they escalate.Â
NextLabs Solution
NextLabs‘ CloudAz is a unified policy management platform that allows companies to author and manage security and compliance policies. CloudAz utilizes Active Control Policy Language (ACPL), a 4GL built on the NIST Attribute-based Access Control framework (NIST SP 800-162) and the OASIS XACML standard. This enables business users to effortlessly update and manage information policies without technical expertise. Â
NextLabs‘ CloudAz is a unified policy management platform that allows companies to author and manage security and compliance policies. CloudAz utilizes Active Control Policy Language (ACPL), a 4GL built on the NIST Attribute-based Access Control framework (NIST SP 800-162) and the OASIS XACML standard. This enables business users to effortlessly update and manage information policies without technical expertise. Â
CloudAz Dynamic Authorization policy engine makes policy-driven authorization decisions based on real-time attributes, simplifying change management processes, allowing for swift and efficient adaptation to major organizational changes. With just a few simple policy adjustments, access permissions for hundreds of roles can be updated simultaneously, eliminating the need to manage thousands of individual access control lists and role assignments. This efficiency reduces the reliance on costly and complex identity governance solutions.
NextLabs Data Access Enforcer allows administrators to establish dynamic data masking and segregation policies that are enforced in real-time within the data access layer. By setting these policies at the intermediary layer between the application and its underlying database, data protection is ensured across all data structures and application access points. This prevents unauthorized access to confidential information during organizational changes and mitigates risks of noncompliance. Â
Helping organizations demonstrate productive internal controls, CloudAz Report Server logs and monitors all access activities, authorized or blocked, streamlining compliance audits in large organizations. Additionally, its analytics capabilities provide insights into user behavior and access patterns, helping audit administrators assess information usage and associated risks more effectivelyÂ
Helping organizations demonstrate productive internal controls, CloudAz Report Server logs and monitors all access activities, authorized or blocked, streamlining compliance audits in large organizations. Additionally, its analytics capabilities provide insights into user behavior and access patterns, helping audit administrators assess information usage and associated risks more effectivelyÂ
