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.
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.
Before anything closes, security and business leaders should understand:
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.
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:
For an acquiring MSP, this becomes more than a security report. It informs:
For the company being acquired, it is an opportunity to document security maturity and show that the environment is understood and monitored, not opaque.
Before Day 1, security leaders should know:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Boards, investors, and insurers respond well to clear metrics that tie back to real behavior. Useful indicators include:
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.
After a few months, patterns emerge:
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.
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:
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.
From a leadership perspective, M&A is ultimately about three questions:
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.