Secure Document Sharing: How It Works

4 November, 2022

Productive collaboration is a key element for today’s successful businesses. Larger projects may require collaboration among multiple departments and inclusion of third-party experts from outside the organization. While these collaborative efforts can improve the end product, they also create serious security challenges, particularly when the team is sharing and generating documents with sensitive and confidential information. Research shows that hackers zero in on archived and work-in-progress documents that are shared in a collaborative environment.

The best way to beat the hackers is to collaborate within an ultra-secure online environment, one that protects both archived documents as well as work-in-progress proposals, contracts, and analytics the team is generating.

ShareVault’s cloud-based virtual data rooms (VDRs) and proprietary program management software provide the best protections for documents shared by an internal team and with outside parties.

Control Who Has Access to Confidential Documents

A virtual data room is a secure cloud-based document repository where users can access and collaborate on confidential documents during due diligence, partnering, litigation, and other processes where security and confidentiality is critical. ShareVault virtual data rooms employ bank-grade security and state-of-the-art features that shorten deal timelines and reduce risk.

Access to documents in a virtual data room is strictly controlled—only authorized users can gain access. Further, the project administrator can designate the specific documents in the data room individual users can access, for how long, and what they are allowed to do with those documents. Documents can be designated as Read Only and other activities such as Copy/Paste, Printing and Screenshots can be restricted. The administrator can provide access to users outside the company, and maintain security with two-factor password authentication. The administrator also has insight into user activity in the data room, right down to the page level, including how long those pages were viewed. This kind of information can provide invaluable insight into a user’s potential issues and concerns—issues and concerns that can then be addressed proactively.

When a project progresses to new levels, a virtual data room makes it easy for the administrator to invite new users, change permissions and policies, or even lock out users who are no longer relevant to the project.

Organize Content With Tags

ShareVault's unique hierarchical tags feature provides all of the advantages of folders, but with additional flexibility, not available in any other solution. This can be particularly valuable for creating an efficient due diligence list in your data room. Frequently, it is important to place the same file in multiple locations in your hierarchical organization. With other solutions, you are required to either put placeholder documents in the appropriate locations that refer to the actual document, or make multiple copies of the file, and place the copies accordingly. In addition to the cost of the additional storage, you'll need to keep track of each of the copies of the same document. With ShareVault, you just tag the same file with multiple tags, and the same file will be shown in each location. This clean and elegant approach provides the best of both folders and tags, and it's only available from ShareVault.

Instant Full-Text Search

With ShareVault, users can instantly search the entire data room and see the search results sorted by relevance, with synopses that highlight how the searched keyword(s) are used in context. ShareVault’s search engine also provides powerful capabilities such as “stemming.” For example, searching for “finance” will find “financing,” “financials” and “financially.” With ShareVault, search is not a separate feature; it's integrated directly into the documents page. ShareVault's powerful search features can help accelerate due diligence and other complex documents because your users can locate relevant documents more quickly and easily.

ShareVault also includes Smart Filters allowing users to filter files based on a variety of filtering criteria, including Recent, Read/Unread, Published by, and File type.

Monitor Real-time Activity

Want to know which user in a specific group is most active or see which documents were most popular in the last two days? No problem. ShareVault’s custom reports feature provides more detailed information on user activity than any other virtual data room, providing insightful business intelligence into your users’ document review progress and interests.

Any custom report you come up with can be saved for future use and scheduled reporting. You can email and print your reports and/or export to Excel for further analysis.

Protect Work-in-Progress Documents

A virtual data room is very good at protecting static documents in the data room so multiple parties can be granted access for review. But what about documents that need to be collaborated on?

During any collaborative business process, work-in-progress documents are routinely circulated amongst multiple team members for input and revision. This process is often accomplished by circulating documents via email or using collaborative platforms such as Google docs. For confidential and sensitive documents this leaves the back door open for hackers to do their thing.

ShareVault has a unique solution to this vulnerability called Dynamic Native File Protection (DNFP) and it’s the only data room that does. DNFP protects any file which users may be collaborating on from falling into the wrong hands, even after that file is shared with authorized outside parties. This is achieved by requiring remote workers’ devices to be authenticated and equipped with the DNFP encryption agent. In addition, document access can be limited by expiry dates. This mode also allows documents to be remotely shredded even after they have been downloaded to a user’s device.

Here’s how it works:

  1. A ShareVault administrator logs into their ShareVault data room and imports a list of their team members (and external parties) email addresses.
  2. The administrator then sets granular permissions by user or group.
  3. Those users are then invited via email to install the DNFP encryption agent on their remote device(s).
  4. Protected files can now be opened on ShareVault authorized devices. Non-enabled devices cannot open the shared files and permissions granted to users, devices or groups can be revoked at any time.

Protect your Documents and Boost Productivity with the Best VDR Solution

In today’s global business environment, sharing sensitive information with team members and third parties is simply business as usual. ShareVault is the industry leader in supplying intuitive, innovative virtual data rooms that provide a simple and secure way to share sensitive documents with third parties during due diligence and other critical business processes.

ShareVault’s on-demand platform is an innovative cloud-computing solution that enables its customers to manage critical time-sensitive and document-centric processes faster and more intuitively. Backed by the experience of billions of dollars in successful deal transactions, along with industry-leading customer support, ShareVault can be a critical tool in accelerating deal transaction times and increasing deal success rates.

For more information, get a free trial or contact us.