On the way to success, you may face many challenges, from employee dishonesty to security breaches and everything in between. Sometimes, even for world-famous corporations like Silicon Valley Bank or JP Morgan, who have reached heights, everything goes catastrophically wrong – even the mightiest are not impervious. But there is also good news! You can avoid some risks by choosing the right solution for managing documents and employees, protecting data privacy, and organizing workflows.

Discover virtual data rooms and choose the best solution for the most efficient and secure business you’ve ever dreamt about!

What is data room software?

Companies use hundreds of online solutions for daily tasks, business communication, document protection, and deal-making. However, they often have to combine several tools without having something all-inclusive. That’s where a virtual data room comes into play.

A data room is software designed with business needs across industries in mind. Thus, it includes sophisticated features for data storage and sharing, collaboration, security protection, user management, and more tools, which we explore further.

Typically, the solution is used for mergers and acquisitions, due diligence, fundraising, initial public offerings, auditing, restructuring, corporate partnerships, and daily workflows. However, data room use cases go far beyond this list.

What should I look for in data rooms?

Before we move on to virtual data room comparison, you should know what reliable platforms usually include. For your convenience, we’ve divided their features into categories and explained everything in simple words.

1. Security

• 256-bit AES data encryption – All your data is unreadable for users without access rights
• Data backup – Nothing uploaded to data rooms can be lost or destroyed with real-time backup mechanisms
• Disaster recovery – Fire or flood, documents remain available and unaffected thanks to remote data centers and providers’ worst-case preventions plans
• Physical data protection – Secure vaults, robust access policies, and an uninterruptible power supply make your storage immune to all physical threats
• Compliance – Providers’ strict adherence to international data security standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO/IEC 27001:2013, make all your operations compliant with norms and regulations

2. Document management

• Automatic index numbering – Whatever the number of documents, the platform automatically organizes them into a logical index that is easy to navigate
• Drag and drop – You need no plugins to move files from the desktop to the platform and back
• Bulk upload and download – Without restrictions on the size and number of documents, users can upload and download data in bulk instantly
• Full-text search – One keyword is entered and the information you need is on the screen; moreover, the OCR mechanism makes digital images, PDFs, and other formats searchable

3. User management

• Bulk invitation – You can invite a single user or dozens of them with a few clicks
• Granular user permissions – Dataroom admins can allow or block each individual user or group to view, share, print, or edit documents
• User group management – According to predefined roles (for example, individual users, collaboration users, or administrators), you can divide all participants into groups and easily manage them
• Notifications – Everyone receives real-time notifications about new documents, action items, users, etc.

4. Ease of use

• Mobile apps – Full-featured or limited, a mobile user interface allows you to work and keep in touch with others on the go
• Multilingual access – A data room interface available in multiple languages erases all barriers and eliminates delays that may occur in cross-border collaborations
• Single sign-on – You can safely use a single login and password for all your projects, which streamlines the authorization process
• No plugins – Users view protected documents in their original format without any special software or downloads

All the listed features can serve as a checklist for choosing a VDR platform. As for other tools, you can evaluate their importance to your team based on your business needs.

What are the best virtual data room providers?

Due to the large number of vendors, which makes choosing a solution quite difficult, we’ve selected the best ones and now compare virtual data rooms in the following table:

No matter how much a data room costs or how many features it offers, the solution will only work for you if it matches your business needs.

Conclusion

As you can see, data room providers vary in functions, service costs, and other parameters. To make an informed decision, determine your needs and budget, choose two or three of the most suitable providers from the best ones above, and carefully compare them by surfing their official websites and asking vendors for the details you need. Also, we recommend considering each virtual data room review from current users. This way, you can learn about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular platform.

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