Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can stimulate growth, provide opportunities to obtain a competitive advantage, increase market share, and even consolidate supply chains to reduce overhead costs. For example, when DORMA and Kaba merged in 2015 to form dormakaba, it allowed the two entities to combine DORMA’s architectural hardware, access controls, and systems with Kaba’s safe locks to provide unmatched solutions for making buildings around the world smarter and more secure.
The importance of security in M&A
When undergoing M&A, there are multiple factors that must be taken into consideration to seamlessly integrate multiple organizations, including cybersecurity. Failing to remain secure can be devastating for businesses, and negate most of the positive outcomes that can result through M&A.
For example, Marriott suffered a data breach in 2018 in which the travel data of up to 383 million guests was exposed, all because of a lapse that happened during its acquisition of Starwood in 2016. Marriott’s lack of diligence on Starwood’s security during the M&A process resulted in several class-action lawsuits being filed, over $28 million in breach-related expenses and a hefty fine of more than $120 million from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office for violating GDPR.
Challenges faced by dormakaba
Fortunately, the teams involved in the merger of DORMA and Kaba understood the importance of security, and took it into consideration when addressing challenges that arose. The merger of the two large corporations in 2015 — and multiple smaller acquisitions since then — resulted in the need for centralized cloud solution management, which led to the creation of Hybrid Cloud Solutions. This team is responsible for supporting a secure cloud environment for all global employees, while effectively managing and securing all email sending services, including Microsoft 365, for over 65 corporate domains.
With such a widespread ecosystem, the team knew this would not be a simple project, and it needed a solution for increasing the level of protection for the environment. As a result, the team initially added DKIM and DMARC to existing SPF capabilities to make dormakaba’s corporate identity across the internet more secure. However, for a company of dormakaba’s size, the SPF 10-lookup limit proved to be problematic, especially after multiple acquisitions added a large number of email-sending services to the company’s tech portfolio.
How dormakaba stays ahead of the curve
Dormakaba chose Valimail to provide centralized management and security for all email sending services. Valimail helped the company right off the bat by using its patented, automated technology to provide visibility into senders using dormakaba domains to send mail to internal employees from outside the organization, as well as outbound mail to customers and partners.
Valimail enabled dormakaba to overcome the SPF 10-lookup limit: Valimail authorizes senders by generating custom SPF records tailored to each message’s sender, in real time, and without limits. Having these capabilities on one platform empowered dormakaba to consolidate all this control and information for all additional business units that were previously operating in isolation.
Additionally, Valimail’s ability to clearly identify cloud-based services that were sending email on behalf of dormakaba made it easier for dormakaba to identify which internal business owners corresponded to each of those services. And when email-sending services used by Dormakaba had difficulty configuring their products to support proper authentication mechanisms, Valimail worked directly with those services to resolve the problems.
As a result of working with Valimail, dormakaba now boasts a successful email authentication program and strong security posture for cloud solutions, which allows dormakaba to scale the process as it continues to expand. “If we didn’t have Valimail, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” says Geoff Stone, dormakaba’s Hybrid Cloud Solutions team lead. “We now have the ability to see, control, and convey to our executive team exactly what is happening under all of our corporate domains.”
Download the case study here to learn more about how Valimail helps dormakaba.
