Secure dataroom is an online collaboration platform that speeds up due-diligence, shortens timelines for M&A and deal-making while providing a guarantee of safety. It allows buy-side and sell-side teams to manage the full process from beginning to end with confidence.
What is different about a secure digital room distinct from file sharing websites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s more targeted towards enterprises with the ability to group users, assign the permissions for them and gain insight into usage through analytics (e.g. when, how and where data is accessible. Many also have more sophisticated options, like the ability to stop the downloading and copying of documents (a huge no-no) or even the ability to display documents on screens which cannot be captured. Many use industry-leading encryption to scramble sensitive information and use multi-factor authentication to ensure that the person trying to log in is actually the one who is trying to gain access.
Most secure datarooms allow users to download PDF files to view offline. If you permit users to print directly to physical printers, or save the documents to file drivers for use for other reasons, they’ll lose the protection provided to the original information stored in the virtual data rooms.
If you are able to extract these downloaded files from the data room or other systems, and then open 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 or litigation, compliance, or other documents that are sensitive and need to be locked to devices and not transferred to servers. This is why we suggest using a DRM solution that locks files to devices instead of to servers and makes it impossible to take them off devices or share them with others.