If your company is involved in a merger or acquistion, you might have to start from square one with your disaster recovery planning. Mike Talon discusses some of the scenarios and what you can do to ensure your data is still covered.
There is a high probability that if your organisation becomes successful, it will be the target of a merger or acquisition -- or perhaps acquire another company itself. When this occurs, the impact on Disaster Recovery (DR) planning can be dramatic. To avoid potential business losses, you must adjust your DR plan as soon as possible to handle the changes due to successful mergers or acquisitions.
There are two scenarios you'll have to deal with in this particular type of situation. The first is what you can do when your firm is the dominant partner in the merger or acquisition. This will give you control over the IT merger process, and an advantage in political and business decisions. Of course, if your firm is acquired, you may find yourself in the opposite situation, where you must take your lead from the dominant market partner and deal with potential pitfalls.
If your company controls the process, IT planning for the new firm is easier in most cases, but certainly not a cakewalk. While your firm can mandate the procedures to be used, there's no guarantee that the other firm will have compatible data-systems, hardware, software, or anything else. This could mean that they will be completely incapable of following your company's lead when it comes to DR planning, at least at the beginning of the process. You may be able to bring political and economic pressure to bear on the new firm, which can help to bring them in line with your company's overall DR plan.
However, you may need to take into account that some things can't be changed for one reason or another, and that will mean training your staff on the new technology, and training the new staff from the merger partner on your existing technology. While this process will be time consuming, it may be unavoidable, especially if the other company has standardised on a completely different technology set (such as a different OS or incompatible hardware platform).
If you're not the controlling company in the merger process, you're going to have to face the flipside of the scenario we just discussed. It will be up to your company to attempt to either adapt to the technology base of the dominant partner, or else justify why the new firm either needs to let you keep what you have, or possibly even take some of that technology into their own shop. If systems are compatible, and the other partner's technology base is better than what you have from a DR perspective, then you should be open to accepting the new tech into your own organisation.
However, if they are not well-prepared for DR, or have technology that is simply incompatible with your solution set, you may need to be ready to assert all the pressure you can bring to bear to make sure you don't get forced to go backwards with your own DR plans. If the dominant partner's DR plan does not comply with regulatory requirements, leaves your data open to potential losses, or does anything else that could endanger your systems, those issues should be well documented and used as ammunition to get your side of the story across to the higher-ups.
Mergers and acquisitions are never easy. Melding together two companies is hard enough from a business perspective, and it doesn't get any less complex from a technology perspective. Being ready for what's coming up, analysing your environment and that of the new partner, and knowing how to state your case clearly and emphatically can keep you from getting the short end of the DR stick, no matter which side of the business case you're on.
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