Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are a messy time of great change and stress that increases your identity security risk.
We covered the most common M&A identity security gaps in depth in a previous blog post: Part 1: Navigating identity-related risks and safeguarding business continuity. Now, in part two of this series, you’ll see how Delinea customers mitigate M&A risks and enable users with seamless access across systems so that their newly combined entity is secure and productive.
Once an acquisition is closed, the first orders of business for an IT security team are securing all administrative accounts across an acquired organization and bringing them under central management.
Secret Server on the Delinea Platform enables you to do this by discovering and vaulting admin accounts.
Secret Server customers protect admin accounts, enforce identity policies, and minimize attack surfaces while ensuring authorized access. By placing one or more Distributed Engines within an acquired organization’s network, you can isolate internal servers from external threats and facilitate secure discovery and remote login sessions.
An Engine acts as a lightweight, scalable agent that avoids having to install complex and risky components to integrate the networks of the two organizations. This makes it quick and easy for an acquiring organization to manage accounts, secrets, and sessions without requiring direct access to the acquired company’s internal network
An outbound-only connection from the engine to Secret Server avoids opening inbound firewall ports, establishing a secure, persistent link without increasing the firewall attack surface. Configured to accept only inbound requests from the Distributed Engine, the server network ensures connections exclusively from the trusted source—Secret Server—reinforcing access control and reducing unauthorized access risks. This also enables network and Active Directory scanning to discover and vault admin accounts for secure management by Secret Server.
Then, you can ensure immediate control over privileged accounts.
Once privileged accounts are discovered and vaulted, the next step is controlling access to them. You’ll want to control which users (from the combined companies and third parties) can log into Secret Server and what they can see and do with the access they’re provided.
At login, authentication (ID and password or federated) plus MFA protects access to Secret Server. Once a user has access to Secret Server, role-based access controls, MFA, and access request and approval workflows control visibility and access to resources and Secrets.
With all admin credentials securely managed within Secret Server, acquiring organizations gain full visibility of all systems and identities within the acquired organization and full administrative control.
Administration of the newly acquired organization may be performed by either the acquiring organization or the acquired organization's IT departments or by third-party service providers. It can be challenging to support these various groups of user accounts accessing the platform.
Infrastructure, administrator accounts, Active Directory, and identity providers from both organizations must integrate, a process that can be complex and time-consuming. Integration is typically conducted in stages. Until full consolidation is achieved, Delinea provides a unified layer of transparency over disparate identity systems, ensuring administrators from one organization can access resources from the other.
Delinea makes this possible by:
This setup ensures that new and existing users can continue working efficiently without network dependencies. At the same time, audit trails and session recordings, along with Delinea’s AI engine, can scan, detect, and alert on suspicious behavior, so if any insiders who are dissatisfied with the acquisition abuse their access, you’ll know about it and can shut them down.
Once admin accounts are secured in their Secret Server vault, Delinea customers generally switch focus to authorization controls for server access. The goal here is to protect all acquired servers at the system level as a crucial step to enforcing least privilege and mitigating the risk of lateral movement.
Delinea’s Privilege Control for Servers (PCS) and Cloud Suite support several common scenarios:
M&A strategies vary between companies. Some opt to burn down the acquired company’s IAM/PAM systems once integration is complete. Others may need to maintain these systems for extended periods.
Some of our customers have opted to retain their acquired identity infrastructure and do an analysis and cleanup of identities. Some have also added Delinea’s Identity Threat Protection (ITP) to:
Delinea’s solutions can provide you with the flexibility to handle your M&A identity challenges to meet your integration timeline. Whether you need to manage temporary coexistence or prepare for full system transitions, Delinea solutions—including Secret Server, Privileged Remote Access, Privilege Control for Servers, and Identity Threat Protection—empower you to integrate securely and at your own pace.
If you’re preparing for an M&A, let’s talk about how we can help you overcome identity challenges and protect business operations during and after the transition.
Read part 1: Navigating identity-related risks and safeguarding business continuity