Secure data rooms are an online collaboration software platform that streamlines due diligence, shortening timelines in M&A and other deals while ensuring complete security. It lets both selling and buy-side teams to manage transactions’ process from beginning to conclusion in a secure way.

What makes a secure, secured dataroom different from file-sharing websites like Dropbox is the fact that it’s more targeted towards the business market, with the ability for users to be www.getdataroom.com/what-is-a-secure-data-room/ organized and permissions to be assigned at granular levels. Analytics can also provide insights into the use of the dataroom (e.g. when, how and where your data is being accessed). Many have additional features such as the ability to prevent the downloading and copying of data (a big no no) or even displaying documents on a screen that can’t be screenshotted. Many have industry-leading encryption technology to encrypt sensitive information and multi-factor authentication to make sure it’s really the user trying to login who is requesting access to the data.

The most secure data rooms permit download of documents for offline viewing in PDF format. If you permit users to print directly to physical printers or save the files to file drivers to use for other purposes, they will lose the protection applied to the original data in the virtual data rooms.

If you can extract these downloaded files from the data room or other systems, and then access them on a computer without being connected to the Internet this defeats the whole purpose of having a secure data room to store M&A due diligence compliance, litigation, and other documents that are sensitive and require to be locked down to devices and not transferring to servers. We recommend a DRM-based solution which locks files onto devices rather than servers. This means that it is impossible to remove them from devices and then share them.