Virtual data rooms are not restricted to one specific industry. Virtual data rooms can be used by businesses to share sensitive documents. This could be as a result of a merger, acquisition or IPO or any other type of business transaction that requires the exchange sensitive documents. In some instances the information required is for regulatory reasons such as when a business needs to provide access to auditors and regulators in order to examine the company’s documents.

Virtual data rooms are used by many companies to speed up due diligence in M&A transactions. The due diligence process may comprise a large amount of documentation that needs to be reviewed by multiple interested parties. The ability to browse and download documents in a VDR helps make the process more efficient and cost-effective.

Other companies utilize VDRs to facilitate document sharing for legal or regulatory reasons with legal teams, clients and third parties. For instance, a law firm may require access to the client’s records and must do so in a secure virtual data rooms for business operational efficiency enhancement environment to keep from violating privacy laws.

A VDR can also allow businesses to automate in-process workflows, processes and approvals. This can cut down on the amount of time and effort needed to perform tasks manually like signing an NDA, managing invoices approvals, or uploading files to the dataroom. A VDR with advanced document processing capabilities will be able to search the text of all file types, including PDFs as well as Excel files.