Do I need a virtual data room?

• Why a VDR is now essential for M&A and online dealmaking.
• How a data room secures and controls confidential documents.

A clear starting point for anyone asking whether they need a data room at all.

Welcome to the Shift Happens Podcast, where we explore the latest trends and insights in the digital workplace.

From the role of AI in the workplace to the future of remote work, we cover it all.

Tune in as we chat with industry leaders and experts.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started in the digital landscape, we've got you covered.

Subscribe to Shift Happens wherever you listen to podcasts and stay ahead of the curve.

Shift Happens Podcast.

Hello, Shift Happens Podcast listeners.

Welcome to Ask Ducks.

This bi-weekly podcast segment is where I answer your questions about the modern workplace, digital transformation, Microsoft 365, and many more.

Send me your question by posting a tweet with the hashtag AskDucks or send me an email at askducksatapppoint.

com.

I'm joined by my awesome colleague Kevin Joy, who's here to facilitate the discussion.

So without further ado, let's get to this week's questions.

Hello, hello, I'm Dux, Raymond Sy and welcome to or welcome back to Shift Happens podcast, Ask Dux.

My colleague Kevin Joy and I covered top of mind modern workplace topics and how you can best maximize it in your organization.

In today's episode, Kevin and I will talk about the need for a virtual data room.

Hey, Kevin, how are you?

Hey, Dux, I'm doing well.

How about you?

Fantastic.

Now, virtual data room, that sounds like the metaverse.

Right.

I mean, we are certainly not in a virtual data room right now, but as a tool of technology that's been around for a minute, but it's really taken on a lot of prominence right now.

And I was hoping, you know, to start off by talking a little bit about coming from you about what the solution is.

I've never heard of it.

Like what's it?

We call it a VDR.

What's a VDR and why might I need one?

Yeah.

So conceptually, here's the purpose of a virtual data room.

So a lot of organizations.

would need to collaborate with other organizations.

Now, you might be wondering, what's a big deal?

Why can't we use email or why can't we just use good old box or SharePoint or Teams?

The difference with a virtual data room is the nature of that collaboration.

Typically, when you think about virtual data rooms, the type of collaboration communication that takes place are highly sensitive and confidential.

So for example, These days, there's a lot of mergers and acquisitions that are happening.

And if you look at that picture, there are multiple parties involved.

Two companies, that's part of the mergers and acquisitions or three, whatever, lawyers, bankers, auditors.

So there's a lot of different groups of people.

And as you may imagine, there's a lot of paperwork involved.

Now, how do they work together?

I have the great fortune of being involved in some of these activities and some I would have to say the experience was an ideal.

We use email back and forth sending attachments, which we all know what the challenges are other than not being efficient.

It's not secure as well.

So in short, virtual data room is a virtual platform where multi-organization can engage and collaborate and work on highly sensitive, confidential projects.

I think the analogy I heard within the company, it's like, A room inside a house with no windows, no way in or out, and a very secure door that only gives certain people access through that door.

Am I on the right path?

100% and for our friends in public sector, I can say this is similar to what in the public sector would call a skiff.

There's no connectivity outside, only certain people with the right key card in the right password in the right iris or I.

I scan a lot in the go in.

You're exactly right.

And you talk about the M&A landscape ducks and it's incredible right now some of the statistics that are coming out just in the year 2021 heading into the new year.

There were $4.

3 trillion of global M&A deals last year just in the first three quarters of the year and that's higher than a full year on record ever.

And then you're seeing almost Almost 100% of M&A deals, that's about 87%, they're being done virtually now.

So you're not seeing anything, we're not doing paperwork in the briefcase in a secure room.

It's just inherently important to have things done securely because it's all online, because we can't get together due to COVID or distance or whatnot.

And then you're seeing a lot of organizations about one half citing cybersecurity challenges because these things, if you leak a document, if there's something that gets into the wrong hands, you could kill a deal or you could affect a stock price.

Certainly, this is why I think the VDR conversation is so important right now.

What's your take on that?

Why we're having these conversations to do this?

You see, absolutely.

I mean, look, there's tons of great technology and solutions out there that organizations use.

But in the end, no matter how sophisticated, how powerful, how feature-rich the capabilities are, it all comes down to usability.

So I've had experiences where the VDR I use are great or fancy and as a technical person, I can figure it out.

But some of my colleagues aren't as technical and they just want to get the work done.

That's why in the end we had to resort back to email.

So I think one of the biggest challenges not that VDR is a new thing, like you said, it's been around, but one of the challenge of solutions out there, it's quite cumbersome, not user friendly, it's complicated and.

And that's what adoption is not so high.

No, so the biggest irony is you're working with the most sensitive information with not a great system, but I'm sorry I cut you off.

What's the second point that comes to mind?

Well, the second point that comes to mind, too, is there's tons of different technologies out there.

And oftentimes what I've seen organizations or these teams would do is we would communicate on email.

We would send the document via, I don't know, a file sharing tool out there.

we would track the progress of our M&A with another tool.

And again, not only there's inherent risk because information is all over the place, but at the same time, it's not efficient.

Beyond security and beyond centralizing information is also the question of efficiency, right?

So we don't want to have a hodge-podge of tools just to get this project done.

Which, you know, coincidentally led us to sort of say, hey, if it's a If there's room for improvement, let's make it happen ourselves.

So obviously here at AppPoint, we are proud to introduce a new VDR solution called Confide.

What can you tell me about Confide that just dropped last week, right?

The week before?

Yeah.

So when you listen to this, I don't know, maybe it's a couple of weeks now.

But yes, we've launched our new technology and solution called Confide.

This is the only VDR fully integrated with Microsoft 365.

And it's hosted locally, providing optimal security and easy setup, meaning it's hosted in your tenant.

and you can also make sure in a secure way have other stakeholders be a part of that VDR.

Now, why did we do this?

Because this really came out of our experience as we went through the most recent exercise of becoming a public company.

And we've had a lot of great colleagues we work with across different organizations, but It was challenging, frankly, to collaborate efficiently in a secure way.

So with our solution confide, we know that a lot of organizations are leveraging Microsoft 365 already.

We're just enabling these organizations to do new with less.

Since you've already invested in Microsoft 365, you layer in confide, you can maximize your investment further.

And the beauty of this is it's easy to use.

that the business, so let's say people in legal or people in finance or accounting or your executive team who's leading this charter can create and enable their own virtual data room without IT's help.

And in fact, IT won't even have access to it, which is very important.

So we're very excited about Confide and we've gotten a lot of great feedback and support thus far.

Awesome.

I wanted to drill into two more of those points about how Confite can essentially change the game for people dealing with M&As and other circumstances.

Confite offers you a lot of really great functionality like managing granular project specific permissions.

So you really have like a real close handle on things.

And you also get an analytics dashboard.

How closely can I monitor a project and why is that so important?

Yeah, this is very important because even in a single, so let's come up with a scenario.

So let's say So Kevin, let's say you want to buy a company, right?

And you're an M&A project, you have different stakeholders, but even though you all are a part of that virtual data room, there may be information that should only be available to the lawyers.

There may be information that should only be available to the bankers or information that should only be available to the company's merging.

So you can tweak it into those granularity.

So the right information.

will be accessed by only the right stakeholder.

So that's important.

And again, I want to reiterate that this capability doesn't require IT handholding.

The business themselves can take care of it.

The other part is when we talk about reporting, right?

So we can also see the status of who's accessing it, who's worked on what, but we can also see the status of task.

In the end, this is a project to do an M&A deal.

We're working towards some deadline.

There's some deliverables.

So apart from using virtual data room to edit files and work on documents, but we can use it to track tasks as well.

And you can see full reports and visibility of who's done what.

So really at the end of the day, it's security, accountability.

That's awesome.

So.

You got a lot of different use cases for VDRs.

You've got M&A, capital raising, legal, audits, compliance, real estate, IP.

It's not just the M&A.

It's a lot of different sensitive times.

But yeah, it sounds like Confide's designed to really help during those high stakes, shall we say, moments.

Yeah, I can even say, think about public sector, right?

Think about government agencies collaborating across agencies or the military if they're working together with other military agencies where information is highly sensitive and confidential.

So Confide, we are perfect.

solution for that as well, especially now that I can say the US government has accelerated their adoption of the cloud in Microsoft 365 is one of their top cloud solutions.

Excellent.

Well, thank you for talking about the VDR today and we'll catch you next time.

Shift happens podcast.

Thank you for listening.

Check us out every week between regular podcast episodes and don't forget to send us your questions on Twitter with the hashtag askducks or send us an email.

AskDucks at AppPoint.

com.