1. Pick one person or a tight team
Try and give just one person the job of overseeing the data transfers. This will leave the smallest room for errors and miscommunication. Yet, it may be wise to move an IT employee from the company you’re potentially acquiring/merging with, to help with the data transfer and risk identification process. Ensure you allow for the time needed to convert any older data for use in newer software.
2. Audit your systems and data
Request that your IT department quickly carries a full system and data inventory. if a merger or acquisition goes ahead, they'll need to identify what systems and data need to be integrated, consolidated or eliminated. A good starting point is to identify business, subject and data experts across both businesses.
3. Centralise your business data
Identify the data assets that need to be transferred. Data for the two companies must be accessed and audited, then if applicable, shared and stored securely. This may help to give a single view of what the combined business would look like in real-time.
4. Create an online virtual data room
Move relevant documents to a secure virtual data room. A virtual data room is a secure online data warehouse that contains vital documents, such as contracts, intellectual property information, employee information, financial statements and so on. It can allow access to all documents or only to a subset of documents, and only to pre-approved people.
5. Carry out disaster prevention and recovery
Consider carrying out background checks on anyone involved in the data transfer process. Think about potential risks that may happen during the transfer, and create a business continuity plan in case of data loss during the data transfer. Before you start the transfer, make sure to back up all data.
6. Protect sensitive information
Data breaches aren’t always caused by hackers. For example, sometimes, data is extracted from systems that contain sensitive information during an attempted merger or acquisition. Although it might be important to get data for testing and development, sensitive information should be ‘cloaked’ to avoid issues should the potential deal break down. Reduce the risk of a data breach with file encryption and branded document watermarking. Control user access or restrict the ability to print, share or download files. Agree in advance, on who you will be using the shared data.