Secure data rooms are an online collaboration platform that streamlines due diligence, speeding up timelines in M&A and other deal making while ensuring complete security. It allows buy-side and sell-side teams to manage the entire process from start to finish with confidence.
What sets a secure data room in contrast to file sharing sites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s more geared towards the enterprise with the ability to group users, assign specific permissions, and gain insight into the use of your data through analytics (e.g. When, how and where data is accessed. Many have advanced features, like the ability to stop downloading and copying (a big no-no) or the ability to display documents in a way that can’t be scanned. Many companies use industry-leading encryption technology to scramble sensitive information and use multi-factor authentication to ensure that the person trying to log in is actually the one who has requested access.
Most secure data rooms also allow download of documents for offline viewing in PDF form. However, if you let users print these files onto physical printers, or allow them to save them to file drivers for various reasons, they will lose the security that is provided to the original data in the virtual data room.
If you can download these files from a data room or other system and then view them without access to the Internet that defeats the purpose of using an online data room to save sensitive documents for M&A due-diligence, litigation compliance and other documentation that is sensitive. These documents need to be stored on devices, and not sent to servers. This is the reason we recommend using a DRM based solution that locks documents to devices instead of to servers, making it impossible to remove them from devices or share them.
