Secure dataroom is an online collaboration platform that speeds up due diligence, reduces timeframes for M&A and deal-making while offering complete security. It allows both buy-side and selling-side teams to manage a transaction’s process from beginning to conclusion in a secure way.
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, set strict permissions and gain insights into usage via analytics (e.g. the time, date and location data is accessed. Some have more sophisticated options, like the ability to prevent the downloading and copying of documents (a huge no-no) or even display documents on a screen that cannot be scanned. Many of them use industry-leading encryption technology to scramble sensitive data and provide multi-factor authentication to make sure it’s the user attempting to log in who is trying to gain access to the data.
The most secure data rooms allow download of documents for offline viewing in PDF format. If you let users print these files to physical printers or allow them to save them to file drivers for various purposes, they are not protected https://getdataroom.com/who-uses-data-rooms/ by the same protection that is given to the original data in the virtual data room.
If you are able to extract these downloaded files from the data room or other systems and open them on a computer, without being connected to the Internet this is a complete denial of the reason to use an encrypted data room for M&A due diligence or litigation, compliance, or other sensitive documents that need to be locked down to devices and not transferring to servers. This is why we recommend using a DRM solution that locks files to devices rather than to servers, making it impossible to remove them from devices or share them.