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North Ark

Acquisitions and mergers

One organisation from Day 1, one tenant soon after.

After a deal closes, people need to meet, share and chat across both businesses straight away, while the full integration takes months. We set up coexistence for Day 1, then move the acquired business into your tenant in waves, and retire the old tenant cleanly.

Start with tenant migration readiness
Empty open-plan office at dusk, with windows looking over a river city.

Day 1: working together straight away

  • Free/busy between tenants, so meetings can be booked across both businesses
  • A shared global address list, through cross-tenant synchronisation
  • Cross-tenant access settings, so people can reach shared Teams and SharePoint with their own accounts
  • Teams federation for chat and calls
  • Security baseline checks on the acquired tenant before any trust is extended
A migration shown as waves. Workloads move from the legacy estate on the left through a pilot wave and waves two to four to the target platform on the right, with dependencies drawn between waves.

Integration: moving into one tenant

  1. Discovery: identities, mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, groups, devices, apps and licences in the acquired tenant.
  2. Plan: waves that keep teams together, communications for each group and a date for the domain cutover.
  3. Migrate: mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and groups moved wave by wave, with identities created or matched in your tenant.
  4. Devices: re-enrolled into Intune under your policies, with Autopilot registrations moved.
  5. Cutover: the acquired domain moved into your tenant with mail routing planned in advance.
  6. Close out: licences consolidated and the old tenant decommissioned once retention obligations are met.

Security before trust

An acquired tenant brings its own risks: stale admin accounts, weak Conditional Access, unmanaged devices. We check them before connecting the tenants and fix the worst before any cross-tenant access is switched on.

Multiple acquisitions

For organisations that acquire regularly, including private equity portfolios, we turn the method into a repeatable runbook, so each integration is faster and more predictable than the last.

Questions buyers ask

What can we have working on Day 1?

Shared calendars, a shared address list, Teams chat and calls, and access to selected shared sites, provided the acquired tenant passes a basic security check.

Can we plan before the deal completes?

Yes. Pre-deal planning works from what can be shared in the data room, and the plan is refined once we have access after completion.

What happens to the acquired company's domain?

It moves into your tenant at a planned cutover, and can keep receiving mail for as long as you need, including after a rebrand.

Do devices need to be rebuilt?

Devices are re-enrolled into your Intune rather than rebuilt where possible. Some may need a reset depending on how they were joined.

Can you also integrate their infrastructure and applications?

Yes. Network, servers, Azure subscriptions and applications can be integrated alongside the tenant migration, planned as one program.

Related

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Get both businesses working together on Day 1.

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