Virtual data room is a reliable technology that opens up many opportunities for entrepreneurs, prominent business players, and industrial enterprises. Data protection, file transfer speed, and the ability of a large team to work on a joint project are reaching a new level.
What is a virtual data room, and what is it for
Imagine a situation: a vital contract is being discussed, the details of which are recognized as confidential. One of the invited partners secretly takes a photo of the document on his smartphone and uploads it to the Web. The deal is broken. Or another case: an employee with trusted access takes a photo of a secret document from his desktop, and then it appears in one of the telegram channels about leaks. There are dozens of situations where you can lose or deliberately compromise a confidential document, but only a few ways to counter this.
One solution is to use permanent or temporary cloud storage or virtual data rooms (Virtual Data Rooms, VDR). According to many studies, such an approach when working with documents already increases the organization’s efficiency.
A virtual room is a space where documents are sorted into folders; all participants have a certain level of access rights and can download files, upload them, and share them. This space format allows you to organize convenient collaboration within the framework of various production business processes.
How to secure virtual data rooms
First of all, you need to protect the cloud storage itself. Cloud infrastructure security means protecting not only the external perimeter but also communication channels and competent management of identification and access to cloud resources. The cloud technology market is actively developing; According to IDC, spending on public cloud services will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% by 2025.
Secondly, you need to protect the files themselves, located in virtual storage and cloud environments. It is worth paying attention to the usual functionality of delegating the rights to view, edit or manage a document to one or another employee or external counterparty and to protect the file itself. Here you can use various DLP and DRM tools. They will allow you to control access to documents and limit the number of actions with them. According to analysts, in recent years, both areas have developed dynamically, especially against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and increased demand for efficient remote work, which, in addition to software solutions for working with content and its storage, also requires a high level of protection of the remote workplace and data.
Thirdly, you need to protect the document and its content. It is essential to consider that DLP solutions will not be able to help when it comes to taking pictures with a phone – when, for example, an intruder uses his personal smartphone to compromise a confidential document. To solve this problem, a more comprehensive approach is needed. The most effective way seems to be the use of a secure VDR-space in conjunction with a unique invisible marking of documents (not to be confused with watermarks), which is preserved when photographed and which, in the event of a leak, can be used to identify exactly who committed illegal actions with a document, up to the name.