The workplace has changed immensely over the last few decades, as have the practices and workflows that are employed within our businesses. At the forefront of these changes, technology has pushed various aspects of our working lives into a new era, where speed and efficiency are front and center for our working days.
With more and more complex regulations being deployed in a vast array of business sectors, no company can afford to be lax with the new rules being imposed upon them from above. Those who do play fast and loose with the stricter ways in which we must now do business can easily find themselves on the end of a rather unsavory lawsuit or two.
Does your business enter partnerships with other organizations on a regular basis? Are local tax authorities scrutinizing your every move? Do you use service providers who need to access sensitive information about your company? Are you in the market to be acquired? Then you’ll need to have all the files required for due diligence evaluations updated, ready, easy to share and with strong, safe access permissions.
The old methods of in-person meetings for reviewing hard copies, or simply emailing attachments, just aren’t practical anymore.
Indeed, with so much more due diligence needed these days in regards to legal practices, the old ways of preparing and sharing documents are no longer relevant. When you consider how different the laws are today around data privacy, facilitating due diligence using a virtual data room (VDR) is paramount to keeping processes running smoothly, keeping documents organized and within arm’s reach, and keeping everything stored and shared securely.
Here are some of the ways in which VDRs make this possible.
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All your sensitive data in one place
The reasons for needing to find such information quickly can range from company to company, but one such reason that can apply to everyone is an audit.
If a company is asked to provide information for tax purposes, a virtual data room becomes an extremely useful way to keep your documents organized. While the more old-fashioned analogue ways of filing this data will still provide the information needed (most of the time), searching and deploying data from a virtual data room is far quicker, and when time is so precious for the majority of us working in SMBs, any opportunity to cut down on admin time is generally welcomed.
Another aspect of why these virtual data rooms are becoming so popular is one of safety. With all the information being stored in one place, on servers that are highly protected, the worry of the data held within the digital vault falling into the wrong hands is reduced. This is especially true if you’re using a SaaS platform that takes data privacy and cloud cybersecurity seriously.
A physical data room with a similar layer of security creates a level of inconvenience that can be troublesome and time-consuming for those involved. If the business using these data rooms is a legal one, having lawyers travelling in from their current location every time they need to access some sensitive legal documents is not exactly advantageous, especially in a modern world where files and documents may need to be viewed and edited readily.
Secure, customizable access
Virtual data rooms allow you to keep an eye on who has access to certain files, when they viewed them, and from what location.
You also reserve the right to revoke access at any time, and the use of multi-factor authentication allows companies to give access to only those who they deem fit to view certain data.
They can even design bespoke permission-based roles, in which employees of a certain level can view some data but not others, allowing all staff to automatically be allowed access to only the data they need, and nothing more.
When you take into consideration the convenience, simplicity, and lack of expense virtual data rooms provide in comparison to their physical counterparts, it is easy to see why this trend is growing exponentially right now. This is especially so in the enterprise sector, where streamlining any business practice can make a huge difference in operating costs.
VDRs are the future of due diligence
While physical data rooms were the only option twenty years ago, the rise of cloud computing has given us an option that is almost irresistible to ignore in the modern age. In almost every industry sector across the working world, the digital cloud is taking over localized data storage in virtually all capacities. It is more convenient, it helps streamline workflow, and is extremely secure.
Whether it is legal documents that a lawyer needs to peruse, a new contract an employee needs to sign, or a tax investigation needing to collate information for inspection, virtual data rooms are making life easier for everyone across the board.
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