Ensuring Integration Resilience : Navigating Cybersecurity Third Party Management Post Merger in Industrial Manufacturing Mergers

Cybersecurity third-party management challenges are increasingly notable in post-merger phases of M&A. Effective management of these challenges and potential risks is necessary to ensure secure integration of systems, vendors and processes. Existing literature on the topic has primarily focused on general IT integration, supply chain and third-party management practices for cybersecurity, and often separately. This study addresses this gap by examining the specific challenges and mitigation strategies related to third-party cybersecurity after a merger has occurred, with an additional and related contextual look at the pre-merger inheritance into thepost-merger phase. A revelatory embedded single-case study design was applied to an industrial manufacturing organization, with interviews and documentation as primary data sources. This design enabled in-depth exploration of M&A and third-party cybersecurity practices, both on organizational, people and process level. The data was analyzed using pattern matching against theoretical propositions. The conclusion of the study is that the identified challenges, measures and strategies can be addressed through a phase-type model to be applied into existing M&A processes. The model includes enhanced due diligence, context-aware standardization, system and vendor alignment, governance and change management. They are all intended to support a secure, sequential but also overarching socio-technical progress for efficient post-merger third-party cybersecurity management.