Data Room

Data Rooms or Datastore are both the same entity. Data Rooms are normally used for due diligence of confidential documents like handling Business Mergers or Acquisitions by bidders & advisers, compliance & audit teams.

Traditionally, there are Physical Data Rooms with Physical Documents. These Physical Data Rooms are for restricted people only, secured by guards with a maximum of one or two parties to go in at any given point-in-time which delays the process if multiple parties are using the same Physical Data Room.

With the growing businesses globally, it was a very expensive affair for multiple teams to fly over to be near these Physical Data Rooms. As an alternate and more viable solution, VDRs (Virtual Data Room) came into the picture which are available Online, behind Firewalls and with proper Access Control. VDRs have changed the game, now sellers can invite a bigger audience and teams sitting in one part of the world to participate in a bid process happening in the other part of the world. VDRs have cut down the cost and expedited the process.

Just like in the Physical Data Room, individuals can review the documents but are not allowed to take out anything. In the same way, in VDRs, copy/ forward/ print activities are not allowed.

Having said all the above, in some countries, VDRs are still not acceptable. The reason is, sometimes the data is so confidential that any Cyber-attack and leakage of data can result in political instability or another scenario(s).

Although the above term is not related to actual Data Domain directly but if we co-relate this term with IT Project's confidential documents then all the Shared Drives used for project documents can be called Data Rooms.