When dealing with stuff on-prem, your options usually consist of moving hardware, or schlepping the software/data to a new home. Care is taken to isolate them and make them ready for transport. Sometimes, there is some additional synchronization that will need to happen to ensure both sides have the same data prior to the close of day 1.

Dealing with SaaS eases some of these choices, but also makes things much more difficult. The advantage is that you don’t have to find a new home, procure hardware, and in some cases even account for networking.

However, the SaaS tenant usually belongs to the company so unless you are dealing with a full acquisition, you won’t have access to the SaaS directly. At best, you will need to sync the data over into a new instance with the SaaS provider or transform the data into your version of the application.

How this sync operation can be done will depend on the provider and type of data. At best, you may have access to the SaaS vendor’s API and stream data to its new home. At worst, you may be rate limited or forced to download from the vendor in chunks at a time, then stitch the results and upload them.

As a part of your pre-close to day 0 activities and figure out what parts of the business will be conveyed post acquisition/divestiture:

  1. Ensure that you build up a list of the applications they and you have.
  2. If there are custom attributes associated with the app (any CRM, issue tracker, etc.) determine all relevant attributes and find a mapping to your version of the apps. NOTE: take special care for data formatting issues as not all systems allow the same symbols.
  3. Determine the best method of transferring the data (whether it can be streamed directly or if it has to be downloaded in chunks).

At this point you should have enough data to determine a course of action, rough development timelines for the sync component, and most important, a rough guess on how long it will take to transfer the data.

That last point will be most important as it will feed directly into your TSA end dates.

Just remember Scotty’s warning when you want the data to be conveyed faster: you cannot change the laws of physics.

cab