Today’s business processes are too multifaceted to do them the old-fashioned way. Paper as documentation has long since become obsolete, and it is such a phenomenon as the data room that is the inevitable breakthrough forward for any company.
Moreover, the limitations that are now present can be precisely removed with the help of software. In addition, dataroom software gives new opportunities for growth and optimization of the entire work in general.
How the Data Room family of programs works
It works quite obviously and simply. For example, large and medium-sized businesses used to have entire racks of documents. That’s what was called the data room, but it was physical. It was literally a room with a huge pile of papers.
During inspections or important business processes, all of these papers were manually searched, provided to stakeholders, and verified by the same parties concerned. This is not the case in modern times, and there are data rooms that have started to make life easier for most large companies.
This trend soon spread to medium-sized companies, primarily in the financial and legal sectors. Smaller companies mostly use this type of software only in cases of important legal procedures.
What kind of features are there
As mentioned earlier, there are basic functions:
- Document and file management: This type of application allows you to manage documentation and corporate files. In fact, various structuring, indexing, and organizing techniques also come into play here.
- Security: This is an essential part, especially when you consider that a lot of different important documents end up in these kinds of applications. Company secrets, financial reports, and legal documents are all top secrets and need to be properly secured. To do this, there is not only state-of-the-art encryption in the application itself and the network that the application uses but also various options for protecting the cloud server of the provider of this software.
- Analysis of documentation, including with the help of artificial intelligence: Some virtual data rooms do offer tremendous opportunities for automated documentation analysis using artificial intelligence. What does this mean for a company? Automating the work and reducing manual audits. Although document analysis is a basic function, artificial intelligence is not everywhere. You should check with your potential provider.
- Tracking of any actions inside the storage: This is a necessary aspect that is related to security. The electronic data room itself is designed to reduce or eliminate the human factor when working with documentation, so the tracking of actions is essential. Imagine if someone accidentally deleted or tampered with some necessary document. How would you look for the culprit? It’s intuitively easy to do with a dataroom. In this way, you can track the performance and efficiency of certain employees who work on generating reports or documents. For example, you can use this method to monitor the performance of the legal department in your company.
In the same way, there are various kinds of additional, exclusive features. They are provided by each provider separately. This is necessary to overcome the competition. You can find out about them directly on the developers’ sites themselves, or look at comparisons and reviews of top providers here: https://dataroom-providers.org/.
Will this solution work for your company?
The answer here is more likely yes than no. For you, it may not work only if you have a too small company with little documentation turnover. In that case, you may not need it now, but most likely require it in the future. Well, there are free subscriptions that allow you to use this type of application even at this level, with the option to always switch to a paid plan if your documentation turnover increases. It’s actually quite convenient. If we talk about what barriers you can overcome with this application, they are:
- Getting rid of paper documentation. This is one of the biggest advantages. Paperwork has become a thing of the past, but most companies only use it because of tradition and habit. Why do you need to print out a thousand documents and keep them on your desk if you have them all digitally? The paper version of important documents provokes a security gap in terms of the threat of data leakage, and it is trivially inconvenient for every employee.
- Convenience. Your overall productivity will increase manifold with data room services because of convenience. Imagine having your entire pile of documents in digital form and having any auditor or potential investor access them in seconds. Now you can avoid tedious and long meetings by parsing all the documents. The other party can look through your documentation in a cafe with a cup of coffee while you are doing other important things.
So data room services enable the digitalization of all documents and the storage of these data inside a secure storage facility. There are many basic functions at each provider, but there are additional ones as well. This type of application allows you to share, upload and download files. It also has serious security methodologies like role assignment and different kinds of encryption to prevent data leaks.
