One of the fastest-growing business sectors in the field of data interchange and storage, the Virtual Data Room (VDR) represents a major turning point in the evolution of enterprise cloud services. It can seem that these types of solutions provide consumers with virtually the same benefits as Dropbox, OneDrive, and other public cloud services. This is only true at first look, of course, but you already know that the devil is in the details. In our evaluation, we will focus on these specifics—the distinctions between VDR and their more traditional equivalents, public cloud services. We will also touch on the subject of VDR use cases, discuss the problems they resolve, and provide a crucial response to the question: “Who needs it?
Why Is this Needed if there Is a Corporate Dropbox and FTP?
Let’s look at the most common scenarios for using VDR:
- It is necessary to send a document to an external counterparty but retain access rights management and control over the dissemination of transmitted information. It is no secret that at the time of transfer of the document to a third party, the owner of the document irrevocably and completely loses control over its fate.
- For design organizations, the actual problem is when it is necessary to provide access to data to the working group only for a certain period of time (the time of work on the project) and then guaranteed to revoke access rights;
- Retailers generally need to protect valuable data from company employees who are at risk or subject to “turnover,” such as sales representatives or merchandisers;
- Solution developers and designers need to keep an eye on the customer’s good faith and ensure that the code they generated and submitted for review won’t be given to another contractor.
- On the basis of the aforementioned, it is clear that no public cloud service, and much more so outdated FTP, is able to completely safeguard the business from these hazards. However, the VDR, which is equipped with the required set of tools, is able to achieve this. Let’s examine this toolbox in more detail.
How the VDR Works
Let’s examine the VCD’s functionality from both the perspective of the document owner and the outside user:
You may independently control the access privileges for various individuals and groups in the virtual data room. In current VDR, synchronization with AD and LDAP is the norm.
Assigning Individual Security Policies to Different Users af a Share
It is possible to manage the lifecycle of documents with VDRs. When a shared document contains information that will expire after a specific amount of time or when a project team has access to the document but needs to revoke that access once the project is finished, this functionality might be helpful.
Document Lifetime Limit in Vaultize VDR
Some solutions let you store a document in a protected micro-container, akin to AD RMS, and then only permit an outside user to download it. As a result, the document is safeguarded not only at the delivery stage and during the first opening (download), but also throughout the entirety of its existence.
One of the main uses of the VDR is to keep an event record when interacting with documents. The most intriguing solutions are those that keep track of who opened a protected document when, in addition to the date that it was opened and downloaded from a virtual data room.
Location Where Corporate Data Is Stored
Contrary to public cloud storage, almost all current VDRs offer hosted and on-premises delivery options, allowing you to use the solution and store data both at the service provider and inside the company. Naturally, the second placement option is more suited for businesses with sophisticated IT infrastructures that are conscious of the importance of their data and the magnitude of hazards involved in its leaking.