The current economy is driving a frenzy of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in both the enterprise and mid-market. “Time to business” is the measuring stick! Merging companies cannot afford to hamper revenue generation by not being able to provide access to key business systems. Bringing two organizations together is always a complicated and major undertaking on multiple levels. The likelihood of the merging companies having dramatically divergent architectures, business systems, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, is extremely high and very problematic.

Traditional approaches to bringing these disparate business entities together involved a lot of custom code, hacks, workarounds and one-offs to make Day One of the merger happen. ICSynergy has developed a solution leveraging Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) that eases the pain and can be a time-to-business lifesaver for your M&A activity, allowing users to access key business systems on Day One.

Let’s say that two organizations are planning to merge. They each have different identity repositories (see Figure 1) that will need to be combined, but they want to avoid an extremely time consuming and expensive migration process.

At the end of the merge, they want to have a unified, common identity repository and IT strategy. Sounds complicated, right?

In addition to technological challenges, they’re also looking at organizational conflicts between the different groups and legacy products. One of the merging companies might petition for a grandfathering process so that it won’t have to change their processes, and there will be many Day One compromising discussions about how to move forward.

But, what if there’s another way? A way to merge multiple repositories with minimal impact to both organizations and personnel?

Directory virtualization with OVD provides an LDAP interface that aggregates all of the data from both sources and presents them as one unified repository (See Figure 2). Now users from both organizations can seamlessly access all the needed business applications.

Through a series of rules, OVD determines where to find the user, connects to the repository, and returns the data as an LDAP entry. Simple, right?

So, what are some of the other advantages to this approach?

• Company-wide applications can authenticate any user as long as they are provisioned on one of the existing identity repositories.
• User accounts can be migrated progressively instead of having projects stalled until all accounts are moved to a single repository.
• Identity data can be merged and modified with no changes required to the underlying identity store.
• Virtualization allows privileged users to access identity repositories securely, even if they don’t have local accounts.
• Audits are simplified since all traffic goes through OVD regardless of where the user is provisioned or where the data is stored. It’s a single access point for audit information.

Sound like something your organization could benefit from? Give us a call to see it in action.

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