How do you bring down an organisation?

It’s been a difficult decision, Steve has been with me from the beginning but John has more experience of cloud-based systems and working with local government. He is the right person for the job. This is the best decision for the company. Steve Workman was not successful in his application for the role of director of ICT. Newcomer John Watts was appointed instead. Seeking to placate Steve, Nick appointed him as head of ICT. Nevertheless, Steve would still have to report to his new boss, John Watts. Lana Scripal was given a temporary contract to bring operating systems and data sets together, rebuild the network defence systems, and support John and Steve in submitting tenders. Nick then dropped another bombshell on his new team.

The deadline for the government contract bid has been brought forward by six months. All systems must be ready in order for the company to be considered. We’re going to have to pull out all the stops and Steve, I’ll need your full support to make this happen. Yeah that’s fine John. Lana, I hope you’re as good as John tells me; we can’t make any amateur mistakes if we’re going to win this type of contract. The team identify that the networks of both organisations are running old systems that are unsupported and obsolete. They anticipate that the company will be upgrading to the latest version of the Microsoft operating system in order to be fully compatible and patchable moving forward.

Nick has high aspirations for his company but did his team investigate Blue Sky’s networks sufficiently before the merger? What are the potential vulnerabilities you would take into consideration when merging two or more IT networks to ensure they are protected?