In 2022, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies was looking for a cybersecurity partner to help them integrate a recent acquisition. Our customer had recently purchased a business which they needed to consolidate with their main business within a short time span.
Within six months, Bridewell was able to securely integrate the acquired company’s people, processes and technologies with our customer’s. This addressed a number of security risks and inefficiencies between the two organizations.
The Challenge
After completing the purchase, our customer found the acquired business had a host of unique cyber security processes, procedures, and technologies. To successfully integrate them into their organization, our customer needed to address these differences to create a single, unified approach to security. Beyond enhancing their security, this would also address a number of inefficiencies that come from having disparate processes and technologies.
This project was particularly challenging due to the scale of our customer’s business. With tens of thousands of employees and dozens of security tools, integrating all technology, systems and people required significant skill and resources. While our customer had the capability to undertake this project internally, they were operating at capacity and needed an external provider to support them.
The Solution
Our customer’s main requirement was a partner they could trust with the security of their multi-billion dollar acquisition. Specifically, they needed a cyber security services company with extensive experience securing acquisitions and with relevant certifications (such as CISSP). Having worked with Bridewell on a number of previous projects, our customer chose us to help them with the security integration.
“In a short amount of time, Bridewell quickly came up to speed with our inherited estate. They took total ownership of responsibilities and documented the current state of the portfolio from a digital security perspective. They worked closely with our key stakeholders across business units and quickly pivoted to help on new workstreams.”
- Senior Project Manager
Once we began the project with our customer, we catalogued all personal systems and data that they would be inheriting. From here, we assessed the risk of each individual application, system, and data set and tested for vulnerabilities. As part of this project, we reviewed over 50 different applications. Any vulnerabilities we identified were then flagged and remediated.
Beyond this, we also determined future data and application ownership to set up our customer for continued success in managing ongoing cybersecurity risk after the project. We also took full responsibility for overseeing the migration and integration of data from the acquired business, reporting any risks to senior leadership. Given the scale and sensitivity of the project, we were constantly engaged with relevant stakeholders to appraise them of any risks we identified.
The Results
Having now completed the integration, our customer benefits from greater visibility across their estate and reduced risk. They’ve also benefited from consolidating their technologies and processes across the two organizations, which has reduced costs and increased efficiency.
Completing the project on time was a specific highlight for the customer, who wanted the acquired business to be integrated within the six-month time frame. Having achieved this, our customer was satisfied with our work and is still working with us to help them reduce overall risk in relevant departments.
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