As businesses face an upward trend in industry consolidation, how can they proactively prepare for a potential merger or acquisition?
Research from the global technology firm Analysys Mason forecasts that the Managed Services Provider (MSP) industry in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region will grow by 14% annually until 2029. And as part of this rapid growth, M&A processes will become the norm in the channel. In fact, reports from Channel Insider indicate that titans within the MSP space, such as Fusion5, Seisma, and Atturra have already announced large acquisitions.
So how can MSPs looking for an exit strategy proactively increase their valuation or become a more attractive candidate in a sale or purchase?
Here’s how help desks serving all verticals can keep pace in a hyper-competitive economy:
Avoid Identity-Based Pitfalls to Support Your Valuation
Before any merger or acquisition, your team must have their due diligence and internal security in order. Whether your MSP has acquired multiple new customers or even taken over another MSP’s book of business, you’ll need to ensure every privileged account in your customer base has been discovered and brought into compliance with your best practices.
A Privileged Access Management platform can offer you an easy way to discover unseen privileged accounts and bring them into compliance. These accounts might come from a large amount of employee turnover at a client or employer in a competitive economy, or from a manual discovery process in previous mergers. If your team is prepared to detect anomalous or malicious admin activity across their endpoint deployment, they’ll be more prepared for an integration process in a merger or be able to demonstrate their security chops to a potential buyer.
By giving help desks one platform that makes it easy to import, identify, and manage all administrator and end user accounts, small-and-medium sized businesses and MSPs alike can achieve greater transparency in an M&A scenario and ensure their company’s first line of defense with CyberQP’s other capabilities, such as Automated Password Rotations to provide always up-to-date passwords.
How Your MSP Can Comply With Best Practices
As global M&A trends begin impacting compliance-heavy sectors, such as public organizations or the healthcare industry, it’s critical for help desks to implement solutions across a merged organization’s technology stack that make it easy to comply with best practices and safeguard end user data, especially for buyers looking to expand into these verticals.
In order to align with requirements to offer clean audit logs and track activity per technician, MSPs might use solutions like CyberQP Passwordless JIT Access to ensure a 1:1 relationship between an administrator account and a technician, eliminating shared credentials that reduce visibility and are inherently less secure than an individual admin account.
Moreover, many organizations in the manufacturing sector struggle with best practices that prescribe removing all administrator rights from end users, who may need elevated privileges to complete their tasks. In these scenarios, they would need on-demand, time-limited administrator access to maintain their efficiency without compromising their cybersecurity.
In these cases, MSPs can deploy End User Elevation to offer a more convenient End User Empowerment experience and grow your MSP with an additional revenue channel by selling End User Elevation as a service to their customers. This will allow you to actively boost your valuation and offer a proven way to streamline customer issue resolution.
Learn More About How CyberQP Can Secure Your Help Desks Through M&A Processes
At CyberQP, we’re laser-focused on offering IT professionals the actionable workflows they need to achieve greater efficiency in a rapidly consolidating economy.
We understand that MSPs and help desks face a delicate balancing act between securing their end users without compromising their productivity. That’s why we offers solutions like Passwordless JIT Access for Technicians, Automated Privileged Account Discovery, and End User Elevation to help technicians accelerate M&A processes and avoid becoming the blocker in a merger.
Ready to see what we can do for your help desk? We’ll be connecting with your fellow MSPs at DattoCon APAC from November 11th to November 14th, 2024. Join us in pioneering a safer, more efficient future for IT services across your region.
