I was invited last week to share with a group of MBA students our perspectives on the history of Virtual Data Rooms. This is a brief compilation of what I shared with them on my experience in this business line. Experience, you see, is a precious commodity because someone was present, involved and personally learned from an event – and hence can share their story first hand to let people relate to it in much better way.

Starting from the humble beginnings when the world’s first VDR was created and used for Debt Underwriting, the industry has grown significantly. VDRs have become the norm in almost all transactions that are in the due diligence phase substituing Physical Data Rooms. But back then, it was a whole different story as the people were reluctant to shift from traditional Datarooms to a Online one. Lets have a look at some of the challeneges that the industry faced when it was nascent .

Prior to my role as a Virtual Data Room Consultant, I had the opportunity to work on a number of M&A transactions which required a significant amount of data sharing between parties. This was the time when physical Data rooms were still the first option for most of the transactions and virtual datarooms were still very rare. The first time we used a virtual data room, the costs went significantly over our initial estimates. We were very surprised with how quickly the total fee charged by the dataroom provider ballooned to a cost that we were uncomfortable with.

Virtual Data Rooms have come a long way from their main purpose as a secure platform for confidential document sharing. Data Rooms are now moving beyond the transaction space, a shift fuelled by the wide spread acceptence in the finance/IT world. In IT-speak, migration is the process of changing from one platform or operating environment to another. It usually involves the transfer of large quantities of data, and typically happens when your server or storage becomes insufficient to meet your needs. 

If you’ve been storing all your confidential company information on an internal server that’s rapidly becoming too small, this would be a good time to migrate over to a cloud storage platform such as a virtual data room.

As a leading Virtual data room service provider, we know how to protect your confidential information. Some use a virtual data room only for specific high profile transactions like an M&A/IPO or Fund Raising etc., while others use a Virtual Data Room extensively for managing all their internal documents. What companies have realised is that although their documents are completely secured with Virtual Data Room,  they have little to no control over the documents which are still stored in emails, networks, drives and desktops. In the past few years a number of our clients have asked us to share our best practices regarding document handling to implement inside their companies. Upon request, here are some ways in which a document retention a disposal policy will ensure the integrity of the data in your possession

Data stored on secure IT platforms such as data rooms is sensitive, and if the wrong people access it there could be significant consequences for your company. The weakest link in the IT security chain is the human element. No matter how secure and robust your security protocols are, there always exists a genuine gap that can be breached. "Trust" and "ignorance" are the two most common human behaviours that add to this gap. People are either too trusting of others (or) they are ignorant of the consequences being careless with information. Those who wish to will do just about anything to gain access to confidential information and mostly rely on people's inability to keep up with a culture that heavily relies on information. In this post we will have a look at the various social engineering tactics that take adantage of the human behaviour and how we can effecively have a control over it .