When a buyer’s technical team looks at your business, they want to know whether you can prove that your IT does what you say it does.
Your own people may be certain that it does. Proof is a different matter, and the questions tend to arrive as a list.
The questions
The wording changes from deal to deal. The subjects stay the same, and each one asks for evidence you can hand over.
Who has access? They will ask who holds administrator rights and how quickly access is removed when someone leaves. A confident answer comes with a list and a date.
Can you recover? You may well have backups. The question is when a restore was last tested, who ran it and how long it took. A restore that has never been tested is an assumption.
Do you hold the licences you use? Software that grew with the business can drift away from the licences paying for it. A buyer will compare what is installed with what you can show you own.
Can someone else run it? If the person who built your systems left tomorrow, could another team pick them up from your documentation? Dependence on one person is a standing item on a buyer’s list.
Which suppliers could you leave? Notice periods and data export rights matter, because the buyer inherits them.
What can you show for security? Patching records and endpoint coverage are quick to claim and slower to evidence.
What good evidence looks like
Evidence has a date on it and a name next to it. A report from last month that shows a restore completing in four hours answers the recovery question. A statement that backups run every night does not.
The same applies to access. A current list of administrator accounts, with the reason each one exists, does more for you than a policy document that describes how access ought to work.
Why the gaps cost you
A question you cannot answer well slows the deal while the buyer investigates, and it can turn into a request to adjust the price. A gap the buyer finds first becomes their negotiating point, and a gap you found first becomes a task on your own list.
The same list turns up in an investor’s due diligence and in a large customer’s security questionnaire. You are better placed answering it once, properly, than answering it again under pressure each time.
Check before they do
Take the six questions above and write the answer to each one with the evidence beside it. Where you cannot write the answer, you have found the gap.
The Sovereignty Index® does this work across five areas of your estate and puts a cost on what it finds, so you know which gaps to close first. You can see what the report looks like in the sample report.
Estimate your annual cost in two minutes with the free estimator, or request an Index and have your evidence ready before anyone asks.