Importance of Investing in Secure Document Sharing Solutions

5 March, 2021

As the pandemic has made abundantly clear, online collaboration and document sharing are a fact of life. Information is shared within an organization and with other businesses, partners, vendors, investors, law firms, and other entities, often on a global basis. While the pandemic will blessedly disappear at some point, the online collaboration will not. Moreover, businesses face critical risks of information infiltration and data theft.

This new business climate of expanded collaboration means that organizations and individuals are often sharing documents outside the company’s firewalls. Given the need, what is the best file-sharing solution?

  • If non-confidential information is being shared, then an email attachment might suffice
  • If team members need to collaborate in real-time, then Google Docs may be a good choice
  • For sharing and storing non-confidential documents, consumer-grade file sync and share platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive may suffice

Protecting sensitive and confidential information

When sensitive and confidential information needs to be shared, these consumer-grade solutions fall short. The better solution is a virtual data room (VDR), sometimes called a virtual deal room. A VDR is a secure cloud-based repository for storing and sharing documents. With the right software, multiple parties can correspond, collaborate, access and file documents in a fully secure environment.

Among the business processes that may require secure sharing:

  • Due Diligence, the investigatory process performed prior to purchasing or merging of a company, including international mergers and acquisitions
  • Common Technical Document, the pharmaceutical industry’s format for the preparation of new drug applications for submission to the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulatory authorities in participating countries. The eCTD is the electronic version of this standard
  • Corporate Repository, where a corporation houses its documents and critical materials
  • Digital Rights Management (DRM), a system for protecting mass-produced digital media from unlawful or unwanted copying or distribution. Information Rights Management is the same principle, applied to document and data security
  • Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT), where collaborators use cloud-based document sharing of property and title documents, valuation analytics and other transaction details
  • Clinical Research Organizations (CRO’s) shared document base of lab results, trial center and remote device data, and patient HIPAA-secure patient records
  • Medical Device development
  • Investor Communications
  • Corporate and Organization Boards of Directors minutes

ShareVault as a Secure Document Sharing Solution

ShareVault is a leading Enterprise Virtual Data Room provider with unmatched security even on computers and devices that are outside your IT department's control. But beyond ultra-secure document sharing tools, ShareVault’s software provides organizational and presentation tools and document sharing analytics that optimize collaborations and move process management forward.

Whether you're doing a deal with external parties or keeping your most important business files organized and secured within your organization, ShareVault allows you to organize and access documents quickly and easily, and with confidence that your important information is safe.

Ease of Use

ShareVault’s platform software is intuitive and easy to use, assuring new users can ramp up in no time. Ease-of-use features include:

  • Hierarchical Tags work like folders but have the additional benefit of tags, which allows a user to trace a document when it is located in multiple folders
  • Drag-and-Drop Reordering of Files and Tags
  • Index Auto-Numbering that adjusts as you add or delete documents
  • Instant full-text Search of all documents in the VDR, with the ability to search by keywords and the search results displayed in context, to better gauge relevance
  • Smart Filters that deliver lists of documents by criteria - Recent, File Type, Read/Unread, Published By
  • Zoomable Thumbnails that provide a ‘quick peek’ of the first page of a document, with a zoom-in function controlled by your mouse to enlarge any section of a page
  • Seamless Integration with cloud-based file-sharing applications, including DropBox, SharePoint, OneDrive and DocuSign
  • Page-level Tracking that provides an audit of user interaction, by date/time, activity, group, user or tag. Results can be shown as a scrollable list of events or a graphical timeline.

Maximum Access Security

ShareVault’s security starts with the virtual data room – only a user with the proper password authentication has access to the site. ShareVault’s VDR access employs an Enhanced Validation (EV) certificate validating domain identity.

User access is easy to control: a team leader can select two-step (two-factor) verification, which enhances the security of a user's login process. The user is required to enter a secure code which is either delivered by phone text message or via the Google Authenticator app, available for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry.

Industry-Grade Document Security & Encryption

Documents in a ShareVault VDR are protected with multiple levels of encryption:

  • Files encrypted at rest with AES-256
  • File connections are via HTTPS over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), providing AES-256 encryption in transit
  • ShareVault’s security is backed by multiple certifications, including SOC 1/2/3, PCI, ISO 90001 / 27001 / 27017 / 27018, FedRAMP Moderate, DoD CC SRG IL2, HIPAA, and HITRUST

Granular Access Settings

ShareVault allows a team leader to set an expiration date so that a user will no longer have access to documents after a given date/time. He or she can also revoke a user’s access permission and “remotely shred” a document, including documents that have already been downloaded.

To ensure documents are not altered, ShareVault automatically converts documents to PDF format when they are uploaded. A team leader can set permissions to allow or disallow access to the original document.

Digital Undertakings

When documents need signatures, ShareVault’s partnership with DocuSign allows a user to send out a DocuSign document without the document leaving the secure environment of the VDR. Additional DocuSign features include email alerts, signature placements, form fields, template design, and the eSignature workflow flexibility.

Final Words

With ShareVault, your confidential business files and collaborative efforts will be afforded maximum protection. And, as an online cloud-based platform, users can access ShareVault anytime, from anywhere, any hour of the day, from any device, without any involvement of your IT team.

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Examples of ShareVault secure document sharing: