Bridging Two Security Cultures: How IRONSCALES Supports MSP M&A

Canalys set the stage earlier this year with expected merger and acquisition activity in the MSP space to grow by about 45 percent in 2025, with managed services revenue reaching roughly $595 billion dollars globally. Looking back in retrospect, it’s tough to argue with the firm. That is a lot of integration work, board decks, and operational change for MSPs, MSSPs, and their customers, all while attackers look for missteps.

Mergers and acquisitions are designed to change everything at once. Org charts shift, tools are consolidated, vendors change, and employees try to stay productive while new processes appear around them. Attackers pay attention to that noise.

For MSPs and their customers, email is one of the first places that noise turns into risk. New domains, unfamiliar senders, incomplete training, and delayed policy alignment all open the door for phishing, BEC, and account takeover attempts that do not look like obvious malware.

IRONSCALES helps MSPs navigate that entire cycle as both a security control and a source of behavioral data that can inform better decisions before, during, and after a deal. The key is to treat email telemetry and user behavior as an asset during M&A, not an afterthought.

Below is a practical way to think about that in three stages.

1. Preparation: Email Risk Translates to Due Diligence

Most security teams focus their M&A preparation on access control, infrastructure inventories, and contract reviews. For MSPs and their clients, email should be on that short list too.

Map the environments and human attack surface

Before anything closes, security and business leaders should understand:

• How many tenants, domains, and major business units are in scope
• What existing email security stack is already deployed
• Whether there is any current security awareness training or phishing simulation in place
• Which departments are most exposed to payment flows, sensitive data, or supplier interactions

MSPs are already used to thinking in terms of service bundles and managed tenants. That context is useful when you look at how an acquired environment is actually using email and what protection exists around it.

Run a behavioral health check on the acquired estate

If you can, treat the target environment the same way you would treat a prospective client. IRONSCALES uses API integration to connect directly into Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, then analyzes real mailbox data to identify phishing threats that existing controls missed and patterns of user behavior around those threats.

A 90-day scan back, for example, lets you surface:

• Phishing emails still sitting in users’ mailboxes
• The employees and executives who are targeted most often
• Departments that attract vendor fraud or invoice scams
• The mix of attack types, such as credential theft, BEC, and vendor compromise

For an acquiring MSP, this becomes more than a security report. It informs:

• Risk scoring for the transaction
• Where incremental investment will be required after close
• How realistic integration timelines are, based on real operational load

For the company being acquired, it is an opportunity to document security maturity and show that the environment is understood and monitored, not opaque.

Include email in your identity and brand protection checklist

Before Day 1, security leaders should know:

• Which domains are used for outbound communication and whether DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are properly configured
• Which third parties send on behalf of the brand
• Whether there have been recent deliverability or spoofing issues

IRONSCALES DMARC Management automates much of this work, making it easier to see who is sending on your behalf and where misconfigurations or abuse are likely to appear.

For executives, this matters because brand trust, invoice collection, and customer communication all depend on email that is both authentic and reliably delivered.

2. Execution: Maintain Continuity Through Change

Once the deal is announced or closes, attention shifts to integration. That is often when attackers increase activity. Staff are distracted, inboxes are flooded with change notifications, and new workflows appear that make unusual requests seem normal.

Keep protection close to the user

Because IRONSCALES operates at the mailbox level using native APIs, it continues to evaluate and remediate emails even as directories, groups, and security policies evolve. The platform builds a behavioral baseline of how people communicate, who they typically work with, and what their normal patterns look like. That context is valuable during transitions when static rules fall behind.

For both the acquiring MSP and the acquired company, this means:

• The same detection logic can run across both environments, even before they are fully consolidated
• Executive accounts and high value roles can be monitored consistently while titles, teams, and assistants change
• New patterns of communication that appear during integration can be evaluated quickly instead of treated as default safe

Use AI and automation to absorb the spike in incidents

During M&A, security inboxes tend to see more user reports, more “just in case” escalations, and more confusion about what is safe. If you increase reporting expectations without increasing automation, analysts will struggle.

IRONSCALES uses Adaptive AI and an agentic SOC assistant, Themis, to classify and remediate the majority of email incidents automatically. Detection blends content inspection, behavioral analysis, and reputation signals, while Themis clusters similar incidents and removes malicious messages from inboxes at scale.

For CISOs and IT leaders, the benefit is operational:

• Mean time to remediation comes down without adding headcount
• Security staff can focus on the minority of events that truly need human judgment
• M&A workstreams do not stall because of manual triage fatigue

Keep people informed, not overwhelmed

M&A affects behavior. New executives appear, new approval paths emerge, and employees receive more unfamiliar email than usual, including from integration partners, consultants, and new systems.

This is exactly when integrated awareness matters most:

• Targeted phishing simulations can be aligned with realistic scenarios that match the new environment
• Short, role-specific training modules keep expectations clear without taking people away from their core work
• Dynamic banners and a report phishing button help employees slow down before they act, rather than relying solely on memory of past training

For business leaders, this is less about “security awareness” as a compliance exercise and more about reducing process friction. Staff feel equipped to handle unfamiliar messages during a stressful period instead of guessing.

Protect the brand and negotiations outside the inbox

In many M&A transactions, high value decisions happen in virtual meetings as much as over email. That has created a new opening for deepfake enabled impersonation of executives and deal participants.

IRONSCALES extends protection into critical meetings through identity verification that can detect signs of impersonation without recording the content of conversations. This is particularly relevant for finance approvals, wire transfers, and sensitive negotiation sessions where a convincing impersonation could have immediate financial impact.

For CISOs and general counsel, it is an additional safeguard for moments where email controls alone are not enough.

3. Post M&A Best Practices: Guidance Through Data

Once the dust settles, the combined company and its MSP partner still need to prove that risk is going down and that the integration has not left hidden gaps.

The data that IRONSCALES collects during and after the transition is a practical way to shape that story.

Build a shared risk picture for the new leadership team

Boards, investors, and insurers respond well to clear metrics that tie back to real behavior. Useful indicators include:

• Auto remediation rate and mean time to remediation for email threats
• The volume and type of phishing attacks targeting key roles such as finance, HR, and executives
• Changes in user behavior, such as increased reporting rates and reduced click rates from integrated training and simulations

For an acquiring MSP, this data can be rolled into a standard M&A reporting pack alongside service performance and SLA metrics. For the acquired organization, it becomes part of the narrative that security posture is improving rather than resetting.

Use behavioral insights to refine operating models

After a few months, patterns emerge:

• Certain business units may consistently see more vendor fraud attempts
• Some newly combined teams may underperform on training completion or exhibit higher risk behaviors
• Legacy domains that were left in place for convenience may attract more spoofing or abuse

Because IRONSCALES blends adaptive detection, DMARC insights, and awareness data, it becomes easier to target improvements where they matter most instead of treating email security as a uniform control.

For MSPs, those insights can inform how you structure future service bundles, which clients may need additional project work, and how you price or scope engagement for acquisitions that follow.

Normalize and document for the next transaction

Many MSPs and growing organizations do not go through M&A just once. It becomes a periodic reality. That makes it worth treating this experience as a template.

Good post M&A hygiene includes:

• Documenting a repeatable playbook for connecting new tenants, running a scan back, and presenting findings
• Defining standard executive dashboards that summarize risk, behavior, and operational efficiency for each acquired environment
• Capturing which combinations of email security, DMARC enforcement, and awareness investments delivered the most measurable risk reduction

Because IRONSCALES was designed around MSP workflows and multi-tenant management, these practices can be standardized and reused across the portfolio, not reinvented for each deal.

Bringing it All Together for CISOs and Business Leaders

From a leadership perspective, M&A is ultimately about three questions:

1. Are we protecting revenue and reputation while we reshape the business?
2. Do we understand where our human attack surface is growing or shrinking?
3. Can we show that risk is going down, not just that tools have been deployed?

IRONSCALES helps answer those questions by turning inbox activity into usable intelligence, automating the noisy parts of incident response, and giving security teams and MSP partners a way to support mergers without slowing them down.

Whether you are the acquiring MSP, an existing partner, or the organization being acquired, the most practical next step is simple: treat email as a first-class M&A asset. Use a structured assessment, such as a historical scan and behavioral review, to understand where you stand, then carry that visibility through execution and into your post deal operating model.