The Challenge
Growth by Acquisition Created an Identity Crisis
Iron Cove's customer delivers SaaS-based fleet management to more than 30,000 private and for-hire trucking customers, helping them manage nearly 1,000,000 mobile assets across more than 60 countries. Microsoft Office 365 is the heart of the company's communication infrastructure — so getting it to work seamlessly across the entire enterprise was critical.
The problem: every acquisition added a new Active Directory forest and a new Office 365 tenant. There was no cross-forest trust, no unified email domain, and no single sign-on. IT was spending an increasing amount of time handling password reset queries from users who were juggling multiple sets of credentials across disconnected systems.
- 🌐Multi-Forest, Multi-Tenant Sprawl — Growth by acquisition left the company with multiple disconnected Active Directory forests and Office 365 tenants — each running independently with no unified identity layer.
- 🔐No Single Sign-On — Without SSO, employees at acquired companies had to manage separate credentials for Office 365 and every other enterprise application, generating a high volume of password reset requests to IT.
- 🌍International Access Requirements — Corporate users were increasingly based in international offices, each with varied requirements for accessing enterprise applications — across multiple time zones and languages.
- 📦Acquired Companies Waiting to Migrate — Each new acquisition needed to be onboarded into the primary Office 365 tenant and a single email domain — a process that had to be repeatable and non-disruptive to ongoing operations.
The Solution
Okta First, Then Migration
After evaluating other professional services providers and identity solutions — including ADFS — the customer elected to partner with Iron Cove Solutions, an Okta-certified professional solutions provider, and deploy Okta before migrating any acquisition companies into the primary tenant.
The Okta-first approach was deliberate. By establishing Okta as the identity layer upfront, acquired companies could gain immediate access to Office 365 and other enterprise applications via a single SSO experience — before the full tenant migration was complete. This decoupled identity access from the migration timeline, reducing risk and keeping users productive throughout the transition.
Working across international time zones required Iron Cove to coordinate working meetings and update calls on a 24-hour clock. The Iron Cove team's multilingual capabilities — including fluent Spanish — helped streamline communication with international offices throughout the engagement.
Key insight: Deploying Okta SSO before the Office 365 tenant migration meant acquired companies were never left without access — and future acquisitions could follow the same repeatable playbook regardless of geography.
The Results
One Tenant. One Login. Everywhere.
With Iron Cove's engagement complete, the customer operates on a single consolidated Office 365 tenant under one email domain, with Okta providing SSO access to Office 365 and all other enterprise applications for users in every country.
Consolidated to One Tenant
SSO Across All Apps
Fewer Helpdesk Tickets
Faster Future Acquisitions
Facing a Similar Challenge?
If your organization has grown by acquisition and is dealing with fragmented Office 365 tenants, disconnected Active Directory forests, or an SSO gap — Iron Cove has done this before. We'll build you a plan.