What is a virtual data room after all? It is a website, as a rule, created for a certain period of time and for a specific purpose and giving authorized users access to a protected document base according to their access privileges.

Initially virtual data rooms were created as an alternative to physical data rooms to perform a due diligence procedure in the course of mergers and acquisitions.Before the era of prevalence of the broadband Internet access the process of getting potential deal participants acquainted with documents looked like this:

• The seller used to assign or rent one or several rooms where folders with paper documents were brought and then ascribed this rental payment or lost profit on misuse of the premises to the expense items.
• A schedule of visiting this room and working with the documents was made up for potential buyers (bidders) which – if their number was significant – considerably increased the time of arranging a deal.
• If bidders were from another town or country, their representatives cheerfully went on a business trip to the world’s cultural centers and reluctantly – to the industrial regions wasting their time on the trip and money on raised subsistence payments.

As a matter of fact, the virtual data room is intended specifically for solving the problem of time, price and convenience of getting access to the documents.At present virtual data rooms support companies’ activities in other areas as well, from providing information to the partners of investment funds to getting certificates on medical products, i.e. in any situation when you need to give a convenient temporary access to some confidential information to a certain group of people who may be thousands of kilometers apart from each other.

What for and how can a virtual data room be used? Practically in any situation when a company needs to give a simultaneous access to some confidential information to several people:

• corporate statement analysis;
• creating an archive of documents – auditing;
• preparing the initial public offering (IPO);
• mergers and acquisitions;
• searching for and providing information to investors;
• bankruptcy and restructuring;
• preparing for getting certificates on medical products or other scientific research results.