VIRTUAL DATA ROOMS

Home » Virtual Data Rooms

How about your own virtual data rooms?

Perhaps you’ve recently started a new project and at some point you realise that the client will be looking to you to provide secure access to all of the project files, documents and communications on an ongoing basis. Thankfully, clients are usually willing to pay for such access or perhaps you’d already made a contingency in your project bid, but financial considerations aside, where do you start on getting your own virtual data rooms. 

Virtual Data Rooms

“Most businesses don’t possess the technical skills in-house to develop such a service from the ground up, quickly and to such a standard that you would be prepared to release it for use in a ‘live’ project when after all your reputation will be at stake”.

virtual data rooms

Your own IT department may be able to outsource certain components or cobble together some modification to your existing infrastructure but, do you really want open access to your own servers to the outside world?

Thankfully, salvation is at hand in the range of online services that are available off-the-shelf, already built to exacting standards and thankfully outside your own firewalls and IT infrastructure. Systems that you can upload your valuable project data to, feeling confident that that data will be secure and not available to the general public but that will be available to those selected clients contacts and associates that you invite to use it.

“The only decision you are left with is which online file sharing product should you choose”.

If security is in the least bit relevant, you would need to be very careful about using a US hosted service. As result of the American Homeland Security Act granting government departments access to wind ranges of data, many companies now insist that all data is stored within the European Union.
Security again may rule out certain “personal” file sharing systems such as Dropbox, where access to secure information is often simply a question of who has access to which PC or laptop.

One other aspect that you may wish to addresses the issue of the number of users required. Some systems charge per user, this encourages clients to “share” access and common login credentials, effectively removing one of the most powerful features available in online collaboration tools, that of having a complete audit trail of who did what and when.

virtual data rooms
virtual data rooms

Support maybe another issue you want to consider, with a UK-based support service being the preferred option.
Finally, data storage size is an obvious issue. Whilst many systems offer unlimited storage, those offers frequently are hosted outside the EU, Many systems offer scalable solutions where capacity can be increased as project requirements grow.

Other features may also be important to you, integration with email so that users are automatically informed when content changes is often seen as essential. Automatic version control with full version history is another important aspect. Other features such as calendar integration and ability to assign tasks to team members are points that you may want to consider, depending on your requirements.

Virtual Data Rooms

The further information about how Collabor8online can help you create a virtual data room, our own UK-based, file sharing and project management service please click or call 020 3369 6491.

More about our Virtual Data Rooms infrastructure setup and accessibility

Collabor8online Virtual Data Rooms Cloud servers’ are cloud based on-demand, performance-optimised virtual machines, backed by lightning-fast SSD storage and our next generation network. Collabor8online is a completely independent, wholly owned UK company. Our high performance and highly available network provides each of your Cloud Servers with its own separate network segment, secure from spoofing or eavesdropping.

A for storing your data within your Virtual Data Rooms collabor8online storage is a highly durable and highly available UK-based “object storage” service, where your files are automatically distributed over multiple storage devices and across multiple data centres for maximum resilience. Your data is stored across our two UK data centres. Your data never leaves the UK. For additional security all data is encrypted twice, firstly it’s encrypted in transit,  that is to say between your PC or browser and our server using the https. (Which is the same encryption that banks use) is then encrypted again when stored or “at rest” (on the disks) in our servers.

virtual data rooms
virtual data rooms
virtual data rooms
virtual data rooms

Practically speaking this means that your data remains incredibly easy to set up manage and maintain, the range of services available you can opt for a completely managed and supported service whereby you have minimal involvement in system setup and (subject to increased cost) data input and management. Most companies require little or no assistance at system set up, however some on-site training and support will invariably be seen as beneficial for both users and systems administrators. It’s a measure of the simplicity of the system the half day training each for admin’s and uses is usually sufficient.

When set up the system is easy to maintain, file synchronisation tools allow folders with on your PC or Mac to be automatically synchronised with corresponding folders within Collabor8online. Alternatively content may be developed locally and then “pushed” to Collabor8online when that information is ready to be published or shared. Security at each step ensures that only users with the appropriate level of permissions can see what you want them to see. And the unlimited users policy ensures that you can share your data with whoever you like without restriction.