Virtual Data Rooms to Provide Secure Data Storage

Nowadays most businesses face problems with data organizing. Big data is a valuable, sometimes life-keeping resource of information, and to properly store it without leaks and wastes virtual data rooms were created.

What Is a Virtual Data Room

Virtual data room (also “VDR” and “deal room”) is a special cloud storage, a decentralized net of remote servers with limited access in severe security conditions. It is perfect for critical, secret company data, which needs to be accessible for multiple users at the same time.

Virtual data rooms also contain special software to process and protect information, to track operations and keep back-up versions of files. They support all popular data types and file extensions and also often allow adding exotic files and archives. Find virtual data room comparison and choose the best one for you.

A virtual data room is perfectly suitable for cases when the 3 features go together: big data, total safety, and convenient customizable access. It is often used for:

• due diligence stage of merge and acquisitions process,
• start of strategic partnership,
• communication with investors,
• mass consulting,
• cooperation in complex projects like software development or biological research.

 Virtual data rooms are intended for big companies, but are still useful even for small ones: they help to organize documents, to accelerate some business processes and to cut the data losses.

The world market offers many data rooms by various providers. The most popular and full-functional are iDeals, Intralinks, Merrill Datasite, BlackBerry Workspaces, Brainloop, and OneHub. A proper data room software comparison assists to choose the optimal one for almost any company.

Severe Security as VDR Main Feature

The main difference between regular cloud storage and virtual data room is a severe security data room maintains. It’s much stronger than one of clouds, discs or other popular data storages. The data room security system contains various components that may differ depending on a room’s provider.

The most common security components are:

• Advanced encryption. Information is written to storage using complex multilayer encryption, so it’s almost impossible to crack. Even if some data leaks, fraudsters can’t read and use it.
• Remote servers. Data is stored at many servers at many places and always has numerous reserve copies.
• Data siloing. Data silos is an isolated repository, accessible to only one team. This organizing type reduces data leaks during the attacks: if one silos is hacked, the rest keep their privacy.
• Continuous backups. Frequent backups reduce time to recover files after system failure to almost zero.
• Special certifications and multi-factor authentication. These instruments are used to identify users of data rooms and track their actions. It complicates an infiltration of attackers into a data room.
• Digital watermarks. They protect data as a company’s intellectual property. Therefore, stolen files can’t be legally resold or published.
• Action logs. In a virtual data room every data operation or user action is written to a special file – log. Logs help to track the error causes, bugs, malicious actions and to decrease human factor influence.

Virtual Data Room against Data Dangers

Primarily virtual data rooms were designed to secure data of hacks, leaks, and the personal servers corruption. But they also turned out to be helpful against less obvious dangers, which still cause huge losses.

1. Hacks and leaks

The virtual data room solutions perfectly manage data leaks and malicious hacks prevention. Attackers have to deal with too many lines of the data room defense system.

• First of all, it’s very hard to forge certification to get access.
• If they invade a virtual data room they will be easily tracked and stopped by the dataroom software or by an administrator.
• They can’t get access to everything, only to one or a few data clusters.
• If they succeed in stealing some data, they will have an unsolutionable problem to decrypt it to use.
• At last, they can’t delete data forever – to do it, they have to destroy the whole provider’s server net.

2. Corruption of software or hardware of a personal device

It’s a case when virtual data rooms are even more reliable than traditional paper carriers.

In a virtual data room information is stored on numerous servers in different parts of the world. If work computers of employees are damaged by a virus or even physically destroyed by fire or water due to force majeure, the data remains safe and still accessible from other devices. Every bit of data is copied multiple times, so even the loss of a few cloud storage servers can’t erase it off the virtual room.

3. Human errors

At regular cloud storages and multiuser desktops data is either accessible to chosen ones or to everyone. At the virtual room administrators can create a branched hierarchy of different access profiles with the most various permissions – for example, particular ones to view, print, save, share or edit a document.

The virtual room often allows distinguishing access for permanent users and guests (for example, employees and prospective investors). It decreases the probability that data will be deleted or corrupted by an unappropriate user.

Administrators of the virtual room have obligatory control over all activities. Every action is tracked, may be reversed and denied. So users don’t make mistakes that can’t be corrected.

4. Memory overflow and software failure

On many personal devices the RAM may overflow during big data processing. In this case the reader program fails, and the data file may become inaccessible or even corrupted. The virtual data room helps with its scalability: all data processing goes on the cloud servers and uses as much computing capacity as it needs. So all data is safe and processed in time.

5. Data loss

It’s a frequent trouble for middle and small companies, that their data is stored very sparsely – on work computers and smartphones, in personal external and cloud storages. Due to poor organization it’s often difficult or even impossible to find a necessary file or folder. A company loses data that is actually in place, and wastes much time for unsuccessful searches.

Virtual data room services provide access to all data via one link, create a flexible transparent data hierarchy and a convenient search. Unlike regular cloud storages, a virtual data room structure can be built or modified due to the company’s needs.

Virtual data rooms combine speed and comfort of cloud storage with reliability and safety of paper carriers. For almost every company it’s a convenient solution, which is able to cut extra losses and to provide more profit.