Secure data rooms are an online collaboration software platform that helps streamline due diligence, reducing timeframes in M&A and other deal making while also providing a solid security. It allows buy-side and sell-side teams to manage the entire duration of a transaction from beginning to end with confidence.
What sets a secure data room against file sharing websites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s designed for the enterprise with the possibility of grouping users, set granular permissions and gain insight into usage via analytics (e.g. when, how and from where the data is accessed. Many also have more sophisticated features like the ability to prevent the downloading and copying of documents (a huge no-no) or even displaying documents on a screen that can’t be screenshotted. Many use industry-leading encryption to encrypt sensitive information and multi-factor authentication to ensure that the user trying to login is the one who has requested access.
Most secure data rooms also permit download of documents for offline viewing in PDF format. If you allow users to print to physical printers, or save files to file driver to use for other purposes, they will lose the security applied to the original information stored in the virtual data rooms.
If you are able to download the files from a data room or another system, and then view them without connecting to the Internet is not a good idea. This is not what you want from data rooms to store sensitive documents view publisher site for M&A due-diligence, litigation, compliance, and other sensitive documentation. These documents need to be kept on devices and not transmitted to servers. We recommend a DRM-based system that locks documents onto devices rather than servers. This means that it is impossible to remove the files from devices and share them.
