Businesses involved in mergers and acquisitions must exercise due diligence in ensuring that the technology environment of the future organization is robust and adequately protects their information assets and intellectual property. Such an effort requires time and open sharing to understand the physical locations, computing environment, and any gaps to address. Lack of information sharing can lead to a problematic systems integration and hamper the building of a cohesive enterprise security posture for the merged organization.

Often, the urgency of companies undergoing a merger and acquisition (M&A) impedes comprehensive due diligence, especially in cybersecurity. This creates greater challenges for the cybersecurity engineering architect, who typically leads the cybersecurity assessment effort and creates the road map for the new enterprise security solution in the future organization. However, the business interest and urgency in completing the merger can also represent an opportunity for CISOs to use additional resources and executive attention on strategic security matters.

In this project, you will create a report on system security issues during an M&A. The details of your report, which will also include an executive summary, can be found in the final step of the project.

There are nine steps to the project. The project as a whole should take two weeks to complete. Begin with the workplace scenario and then continue to Step 1.