SOLUTION BRIEF
Accelerating Merger & Acquisitions with Prosimo
Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit platform improves uptime and provides visibility by measuring network quality and application response times. It also ensures consistent segmentation across the cloud and enables autonomous cloud networking with machine learning. The network fabric is flexible and changes can be executed quickly without disrupting policy.
Merging companies present both opportunities and challenges. Achieving a successful integration of people, processes, and technology is essential in determining the outcome of any large-scale merger or acquisition. The timelines for completing such integrations are often tight, with high expectations to meet.
Most acquisitions aim to create synergies that can result in incremental financial benefits beyond what each company can achieve independently. However, this approach can become much more complex when viewed through the lens of a CIO or CISO.
In modern times, the decision to adopt cloud computing by enterprises has become a business-oriented decision rather than being influenced by technology. In case of M&A activities, the decision-makers may not include IT leadership, but they will be responsible for executing the integration. Therefore, the success or failure of the integration process relies on the capability of the CIO/CISO and their teams to execute it efficiently. With proper planning and foresight in architecture, the integration process can be completed much more efficiently, resulting in a significant reduction in integration time. This shortened timeline can ultimately lead to the acceleration of revenue, potentially generating millions of dollars in additional income.
Fig 1. Merging Cloud environments from two companies is a complex challenge for acquiring IT Team
While M&A integration doesn’t have to bring business to a standstill, successful integration is essential for the acquisition to deliver value. The success of an acquisition depends heavily on the effective integration of the acquired company’s operations with that of the acquiring company. While IT integration can take time, it is crucial to ensure the long-term value of the acquisition.
The Prosimo Full Stack Cloud Transit Platform helps accelerate the integration process by simplifying cloud network and security infrastructure, embracing public cloud service providers, and providing a consistent network architecture, security, orchestration, and automation with operational visibility. It is important to have architectural foresight, whether preparing to merge, acquire, or be acquired, to create a consistent cloud network and security architecture that empowers the IT team to drive the integration process. Inadequate preparation can lead to an inability to accelerate integration, which can adversely affect the success of the acquisition.
Prosimo provides a streamlined solution to IT integration that reduces complexity and accelerates timelines. By leveraging Prosimo’s Full stack platform, customers can significantly reduce integration timelines from an average of 6+ months down to just weeks. This not only saves engineering teams valuable time and effort by minimizing manual IT configurations, but also enables the CIO and their team to accelerate the organization’s timelines and achieve business objectives tied to M&A activity. With Prosimo, customers can confidently approach M&A activities with a proven solution that delivers rapid and successful integrations, ultimately driving business growth and success.
One of the biggest technical challenges in an acquisition is integrating the technology systems of the two companies and enabling them to connect to shared resources and authorized resources on Day-1. This can include merging databases, consolidating user
identities, extending the software and shared IT tools to acquired companies, and ensuring that all systems are authorized and compatible with each other.
Unfortunately, organizations continue to use legacy methods, technology and processes when integrating cloud after a merger or acquisition—slowing operational connectivity while hamstringing the newly formed company with unnecessary network complexity and technical debt.
Connecting Network and Applications: Connecting applications, shared resources (DNS, AD etc), VPC/VNet across clouds requires IT teams to ensure that there is no IP overlapping—a highly manual, tedious process that often requires a new IP addressing schema if not solved correctly and resouces can be extended in a simpler and repeatable fashion to avoid delays in onboarding acquired company resources.
Policy and Authorization: Providing authorization framework for users and applications to securely connect to the data, applications & networks which require organizations to intgerate Identity solutions and Policy schema (an extremely manual, labor-intensive process).
Operational: Integrating networking and security tools is extremely difficult and requires additional training—creating management bloat without providing true visibility and control.
Acquisitions face significant challenges related to skills gaps and resource management, with personnel playing a critical role in the equation. Prosimo addresses these challenges by standardizing operational skills across multiple cloud platforms, enabling professionals to seamlessly deploy and manage network and security infrastructure across different cloud environments.
In addition, Prosimo streamlines the deployment of network and security infrastructure, automating routine delivery tasks to improve resource efficiency. This allows valuable resources to focus on critical integration and architectural tasks, freeing them up to drive better business outcomes. By providing these capabilities, Prosimo helps organizations optimize their resources and enhance their overall performance in multi-cloud environments.
Time to Value
Ensuring that cloud and applications are available faster to both company employees and their partners
Cost Reduction
Consolidation of cloud spend by having complete viability across the environment and using more cloud-native services to build a consistent connectivity fabric
MTTR reduction
Especially when new users are connecting to applications that belong to the other company, having the visibility to see across the full stack will start ruling out network stacks, resulting in efficiencies for mean time to resolution.
The Prosimo Full Stack Cloud Transit Platform
Prosimo is a cloud-native solution for a modern approach to complex challenges.
Prosimo challenges the conventional approach to cloud networking by creating a secure network fabric at Layer 3 and – optionally – through Layer 7 at the application layer. This flexibility means that you may connect subnets within one cloud or across clouds with the flexibility to microsegment down to an individual IP address. Whether it is between CSP regions or crossing over to another cloud (public or private), Prosimo establishes secure transit with consistent policy in only minutes. This requires limited understanding of CSP services and zero need to understand or configure network policies at the L3/4 level which reduces your exposure to technical debt.
Prosimo’s full-stack cloud transit is the only cloud network built on an elastic Kubernetes architecture that understands and speaks the language of cloud-native infrastructure. Because Prosimo speaks cloud-native, it establishes connectivity by working in concert with the most efficient network services of individual CSPs without the bottlenecks of monolithic virtual appliances. Regardless of whether you are using Transit Gateway in AWS or VNet peering in Azure, Prosimo orchestrates the connectivity between functions and clouds, selects the best possible path, and then provides you with a global view of your cloud networks and apps. This is how Prosimo has become the first autonomous cloud networking platform: Prosimo manages all aspects of cloud transit network stack – including security and performance – without the operational baggage or downtime of conventional networking.
Fig 2. Prosimo helps to make network and security infrastructure deployment more efficient by automating routine tasks.
Operational Outcomes
MultiCloud Ready
In particular, acquisitions and partnerships often require integrating diverse cloud environments, which can introduce significant challenges if the network architecture is not designed with this in mind. Moreover, in today’s dynamic business environment, customer demands may require leveraging specific cloud platforms. For example, some customers in the retail sector may require suppliers to operate from specific cloud platforms, which can limit business opportunities without a flexible multicloud architecture in place.
To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to design cloud networks with a multicloud capable architecture from the outset. This allows organizations to avoid technical debt and ensure the flexibility to support future business needs. Prosimo’s solutions simplify multicloud networking, allowing businesses to seamlessly manage multiple cloud environments while maintaining operational visibility and control.
Addressing Overlapping IP Spaces: Streamlining Customer Onboarding
The existence of overlapping IP spaces can present substantial obstacles, both internally for acquisition integrations and externally for service-delivery businesses that need to establish direct connections with customer sites. However, Prosimo’s advanced capabilities offer an elegant solution for managing overlapping IP addresses through the use of global NameSpaces and private link cloud native construct which seamlessly connect enterprises while maintaining operational visibility.
By leveraging this capability, Prosimo effectively resolves overlapping IP headaches, simplifying the onboarding of new organizations as part of mergers and acquisitions, as well as streamlining the process of adding new customers as part of regular business operations.
Connectivity
We have established direct partnerships with all major cloud providers and utilize cloud-native constructs and API calls to provide significant value to our customers. Our platform empowers the use of various cloud network constructs, including Transit Gateway, DirectConnect, VPC Peering, PrivateLinks, VWAN Hub, ExpressRoute, CloudWAN, and more. We overlay our platform over the cloud network underlay, removing CSP limitations on the number of shared routes, VIFs, BGP routes, and other infrastructure constraints. Additionally, our entire platform is built as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, API calls, and OPA to eliminate any manual steps in deploying or maintaining cloud network infrastructure. With our on-prem Connector VMs, we can connect existing private cloud applications and infrastructure with any cloud infrastructure, ensuring app-to-app communication is automated, observed, optimized, and secured at all times.
Observability
With Prosimo’s Data-Plane integrated into your infrastructure, we offer unparalleled insight into the performance of your applications and network. Our platform provides real-time visibility into multi-segment latency issues, enabling you to quickly pinpoint the source of any latency problems, whether it’s first-mile internet, region-to-region slowness, inter-cloud connectivity, inter-account peering, or application response time. Our solution empowers your developer or operations teams to diagnose and troubleshoot any issues, eliminating the need to involve infrastructure teams. We also offer direct integration with popular SIEM platforms like Splunk, allowing you to aggregate valuable data and capture flow logs for entire regions instead of paying for per-VPC logs.
Security
With Prosimo’s advanced platform, customers can achieve granular visibility and proper segmentation of their users and application flows across all environments, including remote users, private data centers, and public cloud ecosystems. Our 5-tuple security policies ensure only authorized users and applications have access to secure information, providing true Zero Trust. Policy deployment is quick and easy, as policies set once are instantly distributed to all cloud regions and private clouds, regardless of total policy library size. Additionally, we use next-generation encryption techniques to provide end-to-end security for all connectivity with Prosimo.
Optimization
Our platform utilizes machine learning to establish baselines and identify outlier connections, providing insights into areas of optimization for all application flows. Our IaC approach streamlines network infrastructure creation and optimization, eliminating the need for manual effort. Additionally, our platform proactively recommends path updates for applications with poor experiences, while providing cost information that may be incurred from CSPs.
Getting Started
With Prosimo, organizations gain the flexibility to take advantage of the many networking services natively offered by a cloud to build on their network, our extensive capability provides flexibility to use our constructs across all clouds . In addition, they can implement a variety of use cases using advanced networking features native to the platform
To see Prosimo in action sign-up for a trial in AWS, Azure or GCP Marketplace.
