Virtual data rooms have been around for some time, providing a secure online environment for storing and distributing sensitive documents. On the face of it, this seems a fairly straightforward task. But look under the surface and you’ll find there’s a lot more that goes into delivering a seamless process than you might have thought.
Here are six service capabilities of data rooms that not all users know about:
1. Upload your data instantly from other file-sharing platforms
Data rooms use APIs in a variety of ways, one of which is to ensure that data can be easily and securely migrated from other cloud file-sharing platforms like Box or Dropbox. This is particularly useful as it means that corporates about to undergo an M&A transaction can, in one click, move their internal files into a data room, keeping exactly the same folder structures.
2. Control where your data is hosted
Business in today’s economy reaches beyond borders, regions and time zones. This reality brings regulatory challenges when determining where to host data. The GDPR, for example, is an important development that now requires close attention from any party in a cross-border deal. More than ever, being able to control where in the world the data is actually hosted is integral to international deal-making, and data rooms allow you to do this with ease.
3. Get a personal concierge for your deals
When large sums are involved, hiring a dedicated personal concierge seems a prudent thing for any business to do to protect its own interests. With a data room, this service comes included at no extra cost. This means 24/7 support and a dedicated relationship manager to look after your interests every step of the way. Even if you need a 3am report on user activity, you will be able to call up the team to get it.
4. Run reports down to page-level on what your users are doing
If the devil is in the detail, data rooms are up to the task with room to spare. Not only do they allow the option to protect documents in their native format – or to make them available in PDF only – they offer a high level of granularity in usage reports. When you use a data room you can find out who is opening which document and when, and even the individual pages they’re reading in real-time.
5. Manage your communications
Data rooms offer a full range of tools for organising and managing communications. A data room’s built-in Q&A functionality is extremely useful for streamlining communication between the buy and sell-sides, and for managing internal conversations about specific documents as well.
Data rooms and their Customer Services teams are also available in most commonly spoken languages. This enables foreign-language bidders to access information and get support in their own language, so that international deals don’t fail due to misunderstandings.
6. Control permissions even for internal teams
Handling sensitive information can be as much an internal challenge as an external one. Indeed, many data room users need to withhold proprietary internal information from their own people, such as salary levels, staff bonuses, and so on. A good data room allows a wide variety of permissioning options, which includes being able to limit what both the buy and sell-sides can see.
FIND OUT WHAT ELSE A DATA ROOM CAN DO
