Carve-Out Data Migration for A Carve-Out Acquisition

11.17.2021

Insurance Company Carve-Out Acquisition Requires an Intelligent Carve-Out Data Migration

Mergers and acquisitions happen frequently as companies swallow competitors or look to add related capabilities to their offerings. Typically, the acquisition details get worked out by executives and corporate lawyers, then at the very end, IT is brought into the loop. Oftentimes there has been very little due diligence done on what the technology stack is of the acquired business, let alone what data they have. This quickly becomes critical for the acquiring IT team to assess data and determine what to do with it.

This process is made even more difficult when the acquisition is a carve-out—an acquisition of a business unit, not the entire company. This is the situation an insurance company was recently faced with. They knew they needed help to identify the data relevant to the business unit and migrate it appropriately.

The Challenges of a Carve-Out Data Migration

To paint a picture of the challenges of trying to carve out a portion of data from an organization, let’s consider a real-life example of an insurance company we’ve been working with. They are a national insurance provider that made a strategic acquisition of a portion of a competitive business that was going to be a great add-on for their current customer base.

The good news was that both the insurance company and the business unit it was acquiring used Microsoft 365. That made moving data from one tenant to another simpler, but still not without challenges. The bad news was that they also had unstructured home drives and file servers. And of course, there is the complication of separating the data of the business unit from that of the rest of the company that was not being acquired.

Fundamentally, the biggest challenge they faced was how to figure out what content was staying and what content they should migrate. Secondarily, they also had to be wary of insurance industry compliance and ensure that the data they were bringing over met their level of classification and protection. They needed a solution to get them the data insight, but also automate the migration based on that insight.

Using Intelligent Data Migration to Clarify the Data for Carve-Out

The acquiring company selected DryvIQ’s enterprise data management platform to identify and classify the unstructured data from the carve-out. They were able to configure identification of known information such as certain policy numbers and identifiers specific to the business unit being acquired. They were then able to automate the migration process for the identified data.

They also utilized the trained artificial intelligence within DryvIQ to look into the unstructured data and identify sensitive information, like personal information on resumes, that needed to be handled in specific ways to remain compliant.

The DryvIQ platform allowed both companies to have confidence in what data was staying or leaving and provided a much smoother, automated process than anticipated.

More Than Just a Smooth Migration

Prior to utilizing DryvIQ, the IT team from the acquiring company was worried they were going to have to direct a manual, user-driven process of data evaluation to parse through the content and determine what needed to be moved. Migrations are already an invasive process for users and with the acquired employees already feeling insecure, they knew this was a recipe for difficulty and increased risk of non-compliance.

The leaders of the migration project were relieved they didn’t have to take that route. Not only were they able to discover and classify all the data quickly, but the migration itself was a mostly automated and painless process. Additionally, the improved labeling and structure for the migrated data yielded a productivity increase for the acquired employees. They truly felt the experience was an upgrade from the company they left and felt better supported in what they needed to do within the combined company.

One of the IT leaders also commented that a fair amount of sensitive data was uncovered during the process. Without that insight, they would have taken on an unknown risk that could have hurt them financially with non-compliance penalties. With enterprise data management in place, they’re able to assess new content as it is created in their environments to ensure proper classification and protection of data.

Don’t migrate old problems to new platforms.