If you deal with a large number of documents on a daily basis, it’s important to understand the document management options available to you. These tools can boost efficiency and allow your firm to operate with a mitigated security risk.
Advanced
Search
Enhanced
search options allow you to view and organize documents by keyword, upload
data, metadata, and other criteria. Searching for these documents can yield
results in a matter of seconds. If you have a meeting lined up with a serious
prospect, one search will provide all relevant information in a clean format.
Proper document management ensures that your files are easy to locate,
retrieve, and receive.
Ease of
Access
One of the major pain points in using traditional document storage is the restrictions on how you can access your files. If all your files are stored on a single hard drive, you’re also exposing yourself to an increased risk that your data might get damaged or lost. By using a cloud-hosted document management service, you can access your important documents anytime, anywhere.
Document
Management Security
Document
management services also host a range of relevant security options. Dynamic
watermarking, audit logging, and print and download restrictions that serve as
safety measures against any external threat that might appear. These tools also
eliminate the potential for an internal threat: if a rogue user tries to
download a document, or has been viewing it for a suspicious period of time,
you will have the evidence to take action.
File Sharing
A cloud-based document management service also allows for freedom to collaborate. Users can share documents back and forth from any location. With detailed security options, administrators can set the rules and determine various access rights. And with the audit trail functionality, they get to know who has viewed or edited particular documents. This often proves to be a critical resource when maintaining liability in the transaction process.
For over a decade, Vault Rooms has been the SAFE, EASY-TO-USE and AFFORDABLE virtual data room provider of choice for investment bankers, accountants, private equity firms, M&A advisors, and many more!
We provide
bank-level security with simplicity of use that allows you to take the hassle
out of document management.
To learn more about our virtual data rooms, get started here: www.vaultrooms.com.
As popular news suggests, information leaks
could easily lead to the compromise of extremely valuable data that was not
meant to be viewed publicly.
Preventing this is a matter of paramount
importance for any firm, regardless of its shape and size. It’s always
important to be extra cautious when you’re exchanging business-critical documents
and other files containing sensitive information with multiples parties.
One of the biggest user oversights in cybersecurity is the trust people place in large-scale email service providers to stay secure at all times. While many people rightfully trust email providers to deliver their emails at fast speeds, the same reliability cannot be spoken for as it relates to email security.
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An Alternative to Email
For firms that need to circulate highly-sensitive
information between multiple parties, virtual data rooms are a wise solution. The
multitude of highly-customizable security settings and document management
features that these virtual ‘fortresses’ provide make them much more immune to cyber
threats.
Mitigating the Risk of Information Leaks
Every company has confidential information
being transmitted and shared in one form or another. This information ranges
from financial, HR and payroll records, customer lists, price lists, to
transaction documents and highly-sensitive intellectual property.
Virtual data rooms can prevent the interception of these valuable documents, as well as restrict end-users from sharing the information with others. For firms that value a secure and collaborative environment, Virtual Data Rooms (or VDRs) are crucial in optimizing efficiency and mitigating risk.
Data rooms alleviate the email security risks
of transferring sensitive information, keeping it out of the hands of unwanted
recipients. Data rooms are being used as a replacement to risky email
transmissions in many fields and industries, including M&A, real estate,
wealth management, board communications, and venture capital transactions.
Looking for a virtual data room to keep your business-critical files safe? We at Vault Rooms are here to help you find a solution that perfectly fits your needs.
In a brilliant article titled ‘10 skills for digital leadership’, Daniel Hood, the editor-in-chief of Accounting Today, emphasized that “Leadership is the common denominator of the [accounting] firms that have great technology and [is] the single most important differentiator between the leading firms and the rest of the pack.” Effective leadership skills have always played an essential role in the success of some of the top accounting firms. The philosophy of successful leadership, when boiled down to its very essence, is about making decisions that position a firm for success; and one decision which often plays a crucial role in the success of tops firms is the choice of a trusted virtual data room provider.
Choosing the right Virtual Data Room (VDR) enables you to boost the productivity of your firm, increase the speed and quality of your communications, improve the client experience, while also ensuring the overall safety of your business-critical documents. In short, VDRs play a significant role in the success of some of the top accounting firms because they firmly reinforce at least 5 of the 10 key digital leadership skills: Communication, Simplification, Innovation, Technical Leadership, and Vision. All of these are mentioned by Daniel Hood in his article.
So let’s take a closer
look at how virtual data rooms help accounting firms in establishing their
digital leadership.
Ensuring Effective
Communication: Request List Management
As Daniel Hood emphasized in his article, maintaining efficient communication channels is one of the biggest challenges faced by all firms. IT leaders have come to the natural conclusion that email is NOT the solution. The reason for this? Huge amounts of lost time in unproductive email conversations. A statistic from Gartner recently declared that professionals spend as much as 50% of their time searching for and gathering documents. What’s even more disturbing is the fact that a major part of this time loss consists of repetitive conversations involving the circulation and location of important documents. So, is there a solution to this problem? The simple answer is YES, Request List Management.
Request List Management (RLM) is a set of features provided by Vault Rooms along with virtual data rooms which allow a firm to significantly improve the quality and the efficacy of a firm’s communication with its clients. The following is a list of the key benefits provided by RLM:
Improves document collection efficiency
Reduces a lot of the back and forth
Centralizes communication
Helps get rid of ALL email related issues (ex: documents getting lost in spam folders, document sizes being too big, repetitive emails for the same thing, having a weak email password which exposes the firm to additional threats…)
Simplifying
Communication
Another important and
often overlooked aspect of digital leadership involves getting rid of systems
and processes that do not support the final outcome – the success of the firm.
The task of automating and replacing processes that add little or no value is
quite similar to how the dead wood is burnt in a forest fire – it’s a great way
of clearing out the clutter and restoring the productivity of your firm. This
is another huge benefit that Request List Management (RLM) brings to the table – it centralizes and
simplifies communication by automating the collection of documents and helps to
clean out the clutter of inefficient communication processes.
Embracing Disruption
& Innovation
Companies are often at
their strongest when their IT leaders have the liberty to take advantage of the
latest technologies that disrupt traditional systems and processes. To an IT
leader, choosing a virtual data room is all about moving away from the traditional
ways of communication and document management towards an innovative platform
that disrupts and streamlines the collection, organization, sharing and
tracking of business-critical documents.
Technical Leadership
As Daniel Hood mentioned in his article, leaders in an organization do not “always have to know how to build the watch,” but with a Vault Room, that’s not a problem. When it comes to VDRs, the ease-of-use along with the access to technical skills means that leaders do not need advanced technical knowledge to effectively manage and monitor their business-critical documents. Time wasted in catching up and learning new technologies is eliminated. In essence, choosing the right virtual data room is about allowing leaders to do what they do best – lead.
Vision
Finally, as Daniel Hood
said, “it is difficult, if not impossible, to succeed with a defined vision,
strategic plan, and an IT strategy to support the vision and plan.” Successful
accounting firms are choosing to use virtual data rooms as part of their
long-term IT Strategy. Not only do VDRs allow these top firms to eliminate
document and collection inefficiencies while also securing their
business-critical documents, but they also serve as an important foundational
component to support their vision and their success.
Choose Vault Rooms
For over a decade, Vault
Rooms has been the SAFE, EASY-TO-USE and AFFORDABLE virtual data room provider
of choice for accountants, investment bankers, private equity firms, M&A
advisors, and many more! We specialize in providing bank-level security with
the simplicity of use that allows you to take the hassle out of document
collection and management.
To learn more about our virtual data rooms, get started here: www.vaultrooms.com
Passwords can be cracked. It’s pretty much every month nowadays that we hear about a new large-scale data breach, the leaking of personal content, or the hacking of major company’s servers. What’s really surprising is that many of these infiltrations could have been entirely avoided by these ‘victims of attack’ if they had taken a few specific steps to generate unique and secure passwords.
According to a 2015 report by technology journalist Carly Okyle, 90% of employee passwords are crack-able within 6 hours. That’s right, 90%.
Why is this happening? Well, one of the biggest reasons is that 65% of people use the same password for all of their web accounts.
It might sound inconsequential at times, but such lack of foresight often comes with a hefty price. It typically costs $200,000 on average for a small business to fix issues post-breach. And this figure has gone up to an astounding $170M for a single company looking to recover from a large data breach.
Where Users Go Wrong
When you look at how many of the passwords are stored, it’s not too surprising to understand why these passwords are exposed. 47% of users surveyed by Okyle maintain a spreadsheet to store passwords. 32% rely on memory, 31% use another form of electronic storage, and 27% write their password on paper.
Taking into account the number of casualties caused by these simple lapses of judgement, don’t you think it’s important to understand what constitutes a strong password policy?
Creating a Strong Password
A strong password policy includes the following:
At least 8 characters
Should not contain personal information
Must be unique from previously used passwords
Should not contain any word spelled completely
One special character
One number
One upper case letter
While this policy will go a long way in ensuring that your password is secure, it’s important to note that nothing is ever impenetrable. Hackers use brute force tools that are trained to make acute password guesses based on common patterns and characters.
Leverage Multiple Security Factors
It’s important to combine the usefulness of a strong password with other security enhancements to maximize the confidentiality of your information. Other safety measures include the use of bio-metrics, two-factor authentication requiring a security question and answer or an authentication text or app code, and the ability to restrict excessive login attempts.
Security is a top priority for us at Vault Rooms and our focus is to provide our clients with state-of-the-art features that allow them to exercise complete control over their data room. With virtual data rooms being used in so many different and new ways, our clients’ security needs have also become more varied. We offer password management features within each account that allow an admin to establish password policies for optimal security protection. Whatever your security needs are, at Vault Rooms, we have a customized solution that perfectly fits your requirements.
To learn more about our virtual data rooms, get started here: www.vaultrooms.com.
