The M&A Due Diligence Black Box: Why Technical DD Takes Weeks (And How to Get It Done in Days)

Every CISO that's ever gone through an acquisition knows the technical due diligence black hole. The weeks spent answering endless questions about third-party dependencies. The scramble to document what your systems actually do versus what everyone thinks they do. The uncomfortable reality that you're giving the acquiring company an incomplete picture because the documentation is always outdated and some integrations were never documented in the first place.

In every acquisition, the acquiring company needs answers to fundamental questions: What external services does this product depend on? What APIs does it call? What data flows where? These questions sound simple, but answering them is anything but.

The Weeks-Long Scramble

Picture the typical scenario. An acquiring company's technical due diligence team sends over their questionnaire. One question stands out: "Please provide a complete inventory of all third-party services, APIs, and external dependencies used by your platform."

What follows is predictable chaos:

The target company scrambles. Engineering teams dig through code repositories. Platform teams export cloud billing reports. Security reviews old vendor contracts. Developers try to recall which services they integrated months ago. Everyone hopes they're not missing anything critical.

Weeks pass. Spreadsheets grow. But the acquiring company knows the uncomfortable truth: they're getting an incomplete picture. Documentation is outdated. Some integrations were never documented. Developers have left. Test environments differ from production. The reality of what the system actually does versus what everyone thinks it does are two different things.

For the acquiring company, this creates risk. They're about to write a check, and they don't fully understand what they're buying. Hidden dependencies mean hidden costs. Undocumented APIs mean integration surprises. Unknown data flows mean compliance headaches.

The Real Problem: Runtime Reality vs Documentation

Here's why this process takes so long: you're trying to reconstruct reality from artifacts. You're looking at code, configuration files, infrastructure-as-code templates, cloud billing, and vendor invoices. You're asking people what they remember. You're hoping documentation is current.

But the only source of truth is what's actually happening at runtime. What connections is your application making right now? What APIs is it calling? What data is moving where?

Traditional monitoring tools can't help much here. Web application firewalls see encrypted traffic fly by but can't tell you what's inside. Cloud security posture management tools show you infrastructure configuration, not runtime behavior. Application performance monitoring focuses on performance metrics, not comprehensive dependency mapping.

The gap between what you think your system does and what it actually does can be massive. Especially in modern distributed systems with microservices, containers, and dozens of third-party integrations.

A Different Approach: See What's Actually Happening

This is where kernel-level visibility changes everything. Instead of reconstructing reality from documentation, you observe it directly.

Qpoint's Qtap agent uses eBPF to capture network activity at the kernel level, where all connections originate. When you deploy Qtap in a target company's development or staging environment, something remarkable happens: within minutes, you have a complete, accurate inventory of every external connection the system makes.

Not what developers think it makes. Not what documentation says. What it actually makes.

Because Qtap operates at the kernel level, it sees traffic before TLS encryption happens. This means you get full visibility into:

• Every API endpoint called
• Every third-party service contacted
• The actual payloads being sent and received
• Which specific processes and containers make each connection
• Request/response details including headers and status codes

All of this with zero code changes, no proxy infrastructure, and no certificate management. You run a lightweight agent and observe.

The M&A Value Proposition

For acquiring companies, this capability transforms technical due diligence:

Complete dependency discovery in days, not weeks. Deploy Qtap in the target's non-production environment, let it observe normal operations, and generate a comprehensive report. You now have the definitive answer to "what does this system depend on?" For larger infrastructures with multiple environments or microservices spread across hundreds of hosts, Qplane provides a centralized dashboard that aggregates and visualizes inventory across your entire fleet of agents. Instead of piecing together data from individual servers, you see the complete dependency graph in one place.

Validation of claims. The target company says they only use AWS services? Qtap will show you if that's true. They claim no AI service usage? You'll see every OpenAI, Anthropic, or Cohere API call. They assert data never leaves certain boundaries? The connection logs prove it one way or another.

Baseline security posture. Beyond just listing dependencies, you see what data is flowing where. Qtap's classification capabilities can flag sensitive data patterns (PII, credentials, API keys) in motion. This gives you immediate insight into the target's security hygiene and potential compliance risks.

Cost and usage intelligence. See which services are heavily used versus barely touched. Identify redundant subscriptions or overlapping tools. Understand the real operational footprint, not just the contracted one.

For target companies, the value is equally compelling:

Avoid weeks of manual work. Instead of pulling together fragmented information, you run Qtap and hand over a comprehensive report. Your engineering team stays focused on running the business instead of answering endless questionnaires.

Provide credible evidence. You're not giving them a spreadsheet someone compiled from memory. You're providing observed, timestamped connection data from Qplane's dashboard showing the complete inventory across your infrastructure. It's unimpeachable.

Demonstrate operational maturity. Being able to produce this level of visibility quickly signals technical sophistication. It shows you understand your own systems.

The Installation Reality

The key enabler here is deployment simplicity. Traditional enterprise security tools require extensive architecture changes. Service meshes need sidecars everywhere. Proxies need traffic rerouted. These approaches are non-starters for the temporary, time-sensitive nature of M&A due diligence.

Qtap works differently. Installation is typically:

curl -s https://get.qpoint.io/install | sudo sh
sudo qtap

That's it. The eBPF agent attaches to kernel functions and starts observing. No architecture changes. No application restarts. No proxy configuration. For a Kubernetes environment, it's a helm chart that takes minutes to deploy.

This lightweight approach makes it practical to spin up visibility for the due diligence period, gather the data needed, and make informed decisions. If the acquisition proceeds, you already have the foundation for ongoing observability. If it doesn't, you've spent days instead of weeks learning what you needed to know.

Beyond Due Diligence: The Corporate Development Play

The smartest acquiring companies are thinking beyond one-off due diligence. Organizations like Cisco, which make multiple acquisitions per year, are building this capability into their standard corporate development process.

The pattern is compelling: give your corporate development team access to Qtap. When they're evaluating a target, they deploy it as part of technical validation. This gives them immediate visibility and builds relationships with both the target's security team and the acquiring company's engineering organization.

After acquisition, that same visibility becomes the foundation for integration planning. You already know what the acquired system depends on. You can identify which services overlap with your existing stack. You can plan data migration with complete knowledge of existing flows. You can spot security issues before they become your security issues.

For companies that acquire frequently, this creates a repeatable, reliable process. Each acquisition starts with complete technical transparency instead of educated guesses.

The Hidden Value: Integration Confidence

Perhaps the most subtle value appears after the deal closes. Integration is where M&A value gets created or destroyed. You need to understand how the acquired system works to integrate it into your infrastructure without breaking things.

With complete dependency visibility from day one, your integration team knows exactly what they're working with. They can identify:

• Which services need to be migrated first based on external dependencies
• Where single points of failure exist in third-party integrations
• What data classification exists in current flows to ensure compliant migration
• Which connections can be consolidated with existing services you already pay for

This knowledge accelerates integration timelines and reduces the risk of post-acquisition surprises. You're not discovering critical dependencies six months in. You mapped everything on day one.

A New Standard for Technical Due Diligence

Technical due diligence doesn't have to be a weeks-long archaeological dig through code and documentation. With kernel-level visibility, it becomes an observational exercise. Deploy, observe, report.

The gap between what we think systems do and what they actually do has never been larger. Modern applications are distributed, containerized, and API-driven. They connect to dozens of external services. They evolve continuously. Traditional documentation-based due diligence can't keep up.

Runtime visibility can. By observing what actually happens at the kernel level where all connections originate, you get the ground truth. Not what might be true, not what should be true, but what is true.

For M&A teams, this is transformative. For target companies, it's liberating. For integration teams, it's essential. The question isn't whether you need this visibility. It's whether you can afford to make decisions without it.

Want to see what Qtap would discover in your environment? The demo takes 60 seconds:

curl -s https://get.qpoint.io/demo | sudo sh

For M&A and corporate development inquiries, reach out to learn how acquiring companies are using Qpoint to accelerate technical due diligence and de-risk acquisitions.