Secure dataroom is an online collaboration platform that streamlines due-diligence and reduces the timeframe for M&A and deal making while providing ironclad safety. It allows both buy-side and selling-side teams to manage a transaction’s entire lifecycle from beginning to end in a secure way.
What makes a secure, secured dataroom different from other file-sharing sites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s designed for the business, with the ability for users to be divided into groups and permissions to be defined at a granular level. Analytics can also provide insights into usage (e.g. the time, date and location data is accessed. Some have more sophisticated features like the ability to block downloading and copying (a big no-no) or even display documents on a screen that can’t be screenshotted. Many have industry-leading encryption technology to scramble sensitive information and use multi-factor authentication to ensure it’s the user attempting to login who is requesting access to the information.
Most secure data rooms also allow document download for offline viewing in PDF format. However, if you allow users print these files on physical printers, or allow them to save them to file drivers for different purposes, they are not protected by the same protection which is applied 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 view them on computers without being connected to the Internet this would defeat the purpose of having a secure data space for M&A due diligence, litigation, compliance and other documents that are sensitive and require to be locked to devices and not transmitted to servers. This is why we suggest using a DRM solution that encrypts files to devices instead of to servers, making it impossible to take them off devices or share them with others.