Document Vault Blog

If you have confidential information that you wish to share with colleagues in more than one location and you want to do this in a secure way that can be done quickly and easily then you need a virtual data room.

If you are in the habit of sending confidential or personal data to your business colleagues, you will want to make sure that the information remains secure at all times and that it can not be "intercepted" or viewed by anyone. Assuming that you don't want to do this through a paper trail of sending physical documents through recorded post, this leaves email, FTP and a secure website as the main candidates for storing and sharing your data.

Unless you are running secure email with SSL (and the recipient of your email is running this also) then email is out of the question, as it is totally insecure. Your emails travel around the globe unencrypted and can be intercepted as they reside on one server after another as they are transmitted to the recipient.

FTP (file transfer protocol) provides greater levels of security, however it can not be easily configured to control who has access to different folders and documents in the file structure.

In comparison, a secure website known as a "virtual data room" or "dealroom" provides the greatest controls over who can see the documents, with stringent controls over user access and folder permissions that determine precisely who can view or download documents and who can add documents to the repository.

It's a no-brainer really, if you want to share confidential documents with multiple parties online then you need a data room.