A secure data room is an online collaboration platform that streamlines due diligence, shortening timelines in M&A and other deals while ensuring security. It allows buy-side and sell-side teams to manage the full lifecycle of a transaction from beginning to end with confidence.
What distinguishes a secure dataroom from file-sharing websites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s targeted towards the business market with the capability for users to be grouped and permissions to be set at granular levels. Analytics can also provide insight into the use of your data (e.g. the frequency, manner getdataroom.com and location your data is being access). A lot of them offer advanced features, including the ability of preventing copying and downloads (a big no-no) or display documents in a way that can’t be screenshotted. Many have industry-leading encryption technology to scramble sensitive information and use multi-factor authentication to ensure that it’s actually the user trying to log in that is seeking access to the data.
Most secure datarooms allow users to download PDF-formatted documents for offline viewing. If you permit users to print on physical printers, or save files to file drivers to use for other purposes, they will lose the security applied to the original information in the virtual data rooms.
If you are able to download these files from a room or another system and then access them without having access to the Internet, this is not what you want from the data room to store sensitive documents for M&A due diligence, litigation, compliance and other documents that are sensitive. The documents must be stored on devices and not sent to servers. We recommend a DRM-based system which locks documents onto devices rather than servers. This means that it is impossible to remove them from devices and share them with others.