Secure data rooms are an online collaboration software platform that facilitates due diligence, cutting down on timeframes in M&A and other deals while ensuring complete security. It allows both buy-side and selling-side teams to manage a transaction’s duration from beginning to end in a secure way.
What makes a secure, secured dataroom different from file-sharing websites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s more designed for the business with the capability for users to be divided into groups and permissions to be set at granular levels. Analytics can also provide information on usage (e.g. when, how and from where your data is accessible). Many also have more sophisticated features, such as the ability to block the downloading and copying of data (a huge no-no) or even showing documents on a screen that cannot be screenshotted. Many of them use industry-leading encryption to encrypt sensitive information and multi-factor authentication in order to ensure that the user trying to log in is actually the one who is requesting access.
The most secure datarooms allow users to download documents in PDF format to view offline. However, if you let users print these files on physical printers or save them to file drivers for different reasons, they will not be protected that is given to the original data in the virtual data room.
If you can extract these downloaded files from the data room or other systems and access them on a computer without connecting to the Internet this is a complete denial of the reason to use a secure data room for M&A due diligence, litigation, compliance and other sensitive documents that need to be locked down to devices and not transferred to servers. We recommend a DRM-based system that locks files to devices instead of servers. This makes it impossible for you to remove them from devices and share them with others.