After an acquisition closes, the seller usually keeps running the target’s systems for a while under a transitional services agreement (TSA). The agreement has an end date, and running past it is expensive. In most integrations, the data workstream decides whether that date holds.
This checklist sets out the work in the order it tends to matter. It is general guidance; your integration management office will adapt it to the deal.
1. Inventory the estate early
- List the systems in scope on both sides, and which pairs of systems data must move between.
- Scan each source and record every file with its size, type, last-modified date and a cryptographic hash.
- Agree who owns each source system for the duration of the TSA.
2. Classify before you plan
- Place each file in a taxonomy your QA, privacy and legal teams recognise.
- Score sensitivity, and flag personal and health data and anything competitively sensitive.
- Separate what must move, what must be retained in place, and what is redundant or obsolete.
3. Respect the deal stage
- Before closing, keep competitively sensitive data away from the acquirer. Work with antitrust counsel on what a clean team may see.
- Plan, but do not move data in bulk to the acquirer until the deal has closed and integration has begun.
4. Move in waves, with sign-off
- Group files into waves by system pair and business priority.
- Have each wave approved by two people with the authority to do so, and record the approval with the wave.
- Track each wave’s state where the whole team can see it.
5. Verify every file
- Read each file back at the destination and compare its hash with the source.
- Treat a mismatch as a failure to resolve, with a written reason for the decision taken.
- Plan for restarts: large transfers should resume where they stopped, not begin again.
6. Close with evidence
- Produce a report for each completed wave, and keep the full audit trail of the deal.
- Apply retention policies and any legal holds to the migrated records.
- Record the formal close of the workstream, and who signed it.