How to Overcome Network Integration Challenges & Accelerate M&A Time to Value

Historically, the financial services vertical has seen the highest M&A activity by value of any sector in the United States (IMAA). Mergers and acquisitions are usually driven by business strategy and macroeconomic realities first and foremost — technology infrastructure alone is not a reason to make or avoid a given M&A decision. However, once a merger or acquisition is in motion, the ability to integrate IT and network technology across multiple environments becomes a priority. It is critical to ensure the two organizations coming together are able to operate as one to support their joint business objectives moving forward.

For example, imagine a large bank whose network team primarily uses Cisco devices and Cisco device automation tooling, and most of their cloud resources are AWS. The parent company acquires a digital financial services startup that offers a portfolio of innovative products to expand their product offerings and attract new customers. However, the startup’s network team mostly uses Azure cloud products and partners with a managed services provider for most network infrastructure needs.

In this situation, let’s say the large bank wants to use their existing mobile banking application to offer the new, innovative products to their existing customer base. Making this a reality would require the network team to interconnect their disparate infrastructure and supporting systems while ensuring security controls are in place across all the participating technologies, in support of achieving the end goal of product exposure securely, reliably, and with high velocity.

In reality, the challenge is orders of magnitude more complex than the simplified example above. Teams are tasked with integrating network environments that are much larger and more complex than a single device vendor and a single cloud environment. The complexity of integrating network environments can significantly slow down time to value — which is why the ability to quickly integrate with multi-vendor network infrastructure and orchestrate processes across it is so important for financial services network teams.

M&A Networking Challenges

In financial services, network environments are complex and changing nearly every day. Configuration consistency and compliance with regulations around sensitive data and audits create additional pressure for network teams. Additionally, cybersecurity requirements are not only a top priority — they’re also constantly evolving.

All of the above is true regardless of M&A activity, but the challenge becomes far greater when new infrastructure is introduced. Network and security teams who are already focused on addressing these challenges are now suddenly faced with an unfamiliar infrastructure stack incoming from the acquired/merged organization. It can take a long time to define processes, build out workflows, adapt security posture, and enforce policies and standards across this entire infrastructure, old and new.

One of the critical concerns is ensuring secure, seamless data transit across previously separate networks. Financial services organizations deal with sensitive customer data and compliance regulations that make network security a top priority. Any lag in integration could not only delay new product rollouts but also expose the business to security risks, compliance issues, and potential breaches.

The integration of disparate networks and automation stacks can become a roadblock to realizing the full potential of an M&A. Without a purpose-built solution, integrating network automation with the new network environment will require either custom code (difficult, time-consuming, hard to scale) or an investment in third-party development services (expensive, often time-consuming as well). Teams need a solution that can help them scale their capabilities and integrate environments quickly to support the business goals that drive M&A activity in the first place.

How Itential Is Solving Network Integration Challenges

Structuring network teams around a central platform — one that brings multiple vendor tools into a single ecosystem — enables teams to operate across various network infrastructures with greater speed and efficiency. This minimizes the need for extensive retraining, allowing network engineers and operations teams to focus on value-generating activities rather than struggling with unfamiliar systems. As a result, time to value and time to market are accelerated, ensuring quicker alignment with business objectives post-merger.

This is where Itential excels. Itential’s platform is designed to abstract away the complexity of interfacing with multiple vendors and network stacks. By offering a unified orchestration and automation solution, Itential empowers teams to build and automate workflows across different network technologies, even those inherited from newly acquired companies.

Itential doesn’t care about vendor specifics, allowing teams to focus on rapid integration and deployment without being bogged down by the intricacies of unfamiliar network stacks. This drives efficiency across the network and ensures that the business can quickly capitalize on the opportunities that come with mergers and acquisitions, confident that their network and IT infrastructure can adapt.

Empowering Our Customers

One of our financial services customers recently used our platform to solve for M&A challenges in the context of network security. The team’s primary goal was accelerating threat and incident response across a global network by delivering blocking capabilities as services across their multi-vendor, multi-domain infrastructure.

With Itential, they were able to easily integrate with SOAR platforms to ingest alerts flagging malicious actors and then build workflows across their infrastructure to block those flagged entities everywhere within seconds.

This might have been challenge enough with their existing infrastructure environment — but the situation was made more complex by a recent merger that left the team managing essentially two unconnected networks with their own security stacks. Without Itential’s rapid integration capabilities and the ability to orchestrate across any domain and system using our abstracted workflow engine, bringing the new network into their existing and planned security strategy would have been a time- and cost-intensive effort, or perhaps even an expensive, lengthy professional services engagement with a vendor if the team lacked the skills and/or bandwidth required.

“After the merger,” their Director of Network Architecture told our team, “it took our engineers a lot more manual time to block any flagged entity across all the different parts of the network. It was already something we wanted to solve, but it quickly became a top priority.”

By using Itential, financial services network and infrastructure teams can overcome one of the biggest hurdles to turning M&A activity into business value — the speed of infrastructure integration. Our platform delivers the ability to orchestrate across any network and IT infrastructure, integrating with any tooling and technology stack to make onboarding of new network infrastructure seamless.

Learn more about our tailored solutions for the financial services industry here.