To best explain the things, you need to take into consideration when it comes to data room providers, you firstly need to understand the notion of a data centre.
Many different things like Google search, a YouTube video, or hundreds of connected Google cloud services all respond to you in a fraction of seconds, right?! Right! It all happens so fast that most of us do not know what happens in the background of a said search for any info or a video on YT. What happens is that your search query travels through the internet and straight into Google’s global fibre network. This is of course presumably you are using Google services.
Now, these questions query or data packets travel through the internet to the data centre or one of so many that providers have set up all over the world. But besides gathering all the queries and responding to you with haste, a data centre is a building that has many powerful computers that are used to run a company’s services. These computers are what gather this information, process them and make them available to you in the fastest time possible.
Now that you know what a data centre is and how it operates let’s use that knowledge to transfer to data room providers. Thanks to insight from docurex we bring you these things to consider when choosing one.
Before we get into these, we need to inform you that the data rooms are probably the most important thing to keep when you are managing a company, big or small. With virtual data rooms, you keep all the documents, confidential agreements and even intellectual property that was a result of your business moves, in one place that is accessible to you and your workers with proper credentials.
Now whenever you are trying to find a correct virtual data room provider for yourself tailored to the business type you need to look at some key features, like:
1. Customizable folder permissions
Whenever you are working with a lot of data and information, to keep everything clean, nice and tidy, and most importantly easy to find you need a lot of folders that have customization options. You also need customizable permissions for those folders because not everyone can and should have open access to all the documents. Wherever consumer-grade data is available to be shared or private VDR or virtual data rooms allow administrators to choose which specific users can see a file, share it or edit it.
2. Customizable document permissions
This is in a lot of ways similar to folder permissions, VDRs also allows to customize the level of access for documents. Not all parties in the same project, for instance, can and will have the same level of access to the document. This helps maintain security and lower the risks of information malversation.
3. Document expiration
This type of feature that VDRs offer, means that you, or your administrators, can easily make certain documents expire after a certain amount of time and you can also set this up to revoke access if anything changes.
4. Watermarking
This is self-explanatory and means that each document in your business and organization can be watermarked to avoid document replication and false redistribution to parties not involved in the process.
5. Monitor user activity
This is a neat function of VDR where your admins can very easily monitor all the users and see which users approached which document. This increases security but also helps you track project activity. Who is working and when, and most importantly on what?
6. Q&A
On top of these mostly regular features, we just wrote about VDRs often adding some of the special features to increase ease and usability. One of those special features is a Q&A module that is supposed to expedite and improve the same process during an M&A deal. This is a quality and ease of life thing and it is very welcomed as far as most businesses are concerned.
7. The bulk upload and download
To allow your business to be as productive and as fast as possible things like bulk upload and download are more than welcome. A good VDR provider will have this as an offer to allow your admins and/or users to upload and download bulk of data at once, instead of going one by one. This also refers to adding users as well. Sometimes it is difficult adding one by one individual and it is very time-consuming. When you have a bulk upload and download of both users and documents your job is made a lot easier.
8. Analytics and reports
This is a neat bonus with some VDR providers while an integral part of their offer with others. This will allow you to see more about user activity, data room or rooms usage, document exchanges and so on. Based on this info you can easily create charts and generate reports that will allow an easy overview of the entire business operation.
9. API Integration
This is something that will allow your organization to integrate a VDR into your business systems and heavily modify it to meet the requirements of that business. Whenever you are talking about huge amounts of data and specific operations, you need to have flexibility in these things and API integration allows VDR just that. Total adjustment to your needs and tailoring to the structure of your business.
As the bottom line, we just have to tell you that choosing the right VDR provider is not that difficult. The reason behind that is that most of the providers offer things we wrote above. You have to know the features you need and you have to know what you want to achieve with that VDR. If you know that it is all about comparing offers from VDR providers. As we said most of the good ones will have all these features and all you have to do is understand how their specific VDR works, what kind of projects does it support and how the company positions themselves in prices their VDR offering.
