Virtual Data Rooms

Keep your data close

M&A transactions, loan syndication, private equity and venture capital transactions require the utmost confidentiality. And all that without any data leaving your organization.

Forget about SAAS and outsourcing: an on-premises Nextcloud VDR offers the ease of use that speeds up deal making while strict control over access and fine grained auditing ensure sensitive data remains secure.

Virtual Data Rooms have revolutionized transaction processes with 24/7 global access and reduced risks, but sending data off-premises reduces control. Nextcloud offers a controlled environment where confidentiality can be preserved, while work gets done as efficient as with familiar consumer technology.

Key benefits

Under your control

Do not resort to outsourcing. Rather than hosting your sensitive company data with a third party, keep it 100% on premises while offering the highly secure access and communication facilities required by a partner or prospect.

A complete platform

An easy, familiar user interface means efficient work. Nextcloud is unique by offering the most extensive built in communication and collaboration technology in the industry, negating the complexity of running and connecting multiple separate solutions.

Military-grade security

Nextcloud offers industry-first, unique solutions like Video Verification, machine-learning-driven suspicious login detection, extensive multi-factor authentication solutions and more. Extensive logging and monitoring show users, administrators and auditors the exact flow of data and who had access at what time.

Available-anywhere collaboration

Switching between different tools is more than cumbersome and inefficient: it also massively increases the chance for mistakes to result in data leaks. For a process as important as making a sensitive deal, you can not risk an email send to the wrong address compromising your business.

Nextcloud integrates comments, chat and secure audio/video calls, offers real-time notifications through mobile, web and desktop interfaces and integrates document viewing and editing all in one platform. It even comes with groupware functionalities like a calendar, task management and email functionality so meetings, plans, invitations and all the details they come with stay within the secure data room.

Note: A wide range of features exists in the VDR space, and like any solution, Nextcloud covers some and not others. Configuring a virtual data room in Nextcloud requires an analysis of security and functionality requirements and careful configuration. See our customer portal for details.

A real use case

To ensure 6 employees from a third party can check the books and approve a deal, a Nextcloud VDR is set up. The internal team of 11 employees each gets an account where they can freely upload and collaborate on documents, through their mobile devices as well as by editing, chat and calls in the browser. The 6 guests receive a guest account.

The welcome mail guides the guests to set up their account with a password and a second factor of their choice: a hardware key, a one-time-password mechanism like Google Authenticator or an SMS. Then they can log in.

The internal team can share files with the guests, with or without editing rights for the guest (on a per-file basis). Their Outlook email application will, when an email is written to a guest, automatically upload attachments as well as mail body to the VDR and simply notify the guest that a new message was received.

Besides email, users can comment on documents, which will notify a mentioned person or the document owner. Last but not least, real-time audio/video communication and chat are available, all within the VDR. This ensures no information, not even the content of emails or meta data of chat and calls can leak.

Aside from participating in communication when invited, the six guests can only ever see and, if they have the access rights, edit files. The files can not be downloaded, copied from or printed and are watermarked on the screen at all times. Guests can also not upload files unless a folder is made available to them where they can do so, nor connect with third party tools or clients to Nextcloud unless explicitly allowed. Any file has to be accessed securely through the browser or is not available.

At the end of the process, the VDR is archived and any devices which were set up are remotely wiped by the administrator using the built-in remote wipe feature.

Is this what you need?

Customers can log into our customer portal for details on how to configure Nextcloud for this scenario: Nextcloud and Virtual Data Room configuration

Secure view in action

With secure view, our online office solutions can be configured to open PDF files, images and text files, making these files available in a watermark-protected way, while downloads and other apps are disabled using File Access Control. This setup is useful when data has to be protected from leaking but still has to be made available for review, as in a virtual data room scenario.

Configuring Secure View in Collabora

Setting a ‘confidential’ tag

Secure view watermarked file

Secure mailbox

The Nextcloud Secure Sharing Outlook Add-in includes a secure mailbox feature. This feature protects the contents (body) of email from interception by providing the recipient with a notification that a new email was received. The recipient then has to log in on their (guest) account to access the email and its attachments.

The body of the email is shown with the file attachments. Each email is a folder, linked to in the email notification.

In the screenshots below, the user sends the link and password to the recipient by email. The user can take out the password and send it through another channel. Alternatively, when a guest account is set up for the recipient, the Outlook add-in will detect this and instead share the message to the guest account and include an internal link in the email. The recipient will have to log into their guest account to access the email.

Writing an email

Attaching files, enabling Secure Mailbox

Email as it will be sent to recipient

Recipient view in Secure Mailbox in Nextcloud

Features

As leading content collaboration platform, Nextcloud has been designed for security and ease of use. A Nextcloud VDR offers:

Activity tracking and audit log, real-time reporting
Built in secure communication with comments and audio/video chat
Secure email box (prevent leaking of email content and attachments with Outlook integration)
Advanced search within the whole VDR
Extensive file compatibility
Unlimited data and accounts
Easy, familiar interface
Document versioning

Extensive security capabilites including:
Multi-layer, military-grade encryption
Advanced digital rights management
multi-factor authentication
Video Verification to ensure identity proof
Extensive file access control mechanisms
Watermarking of files
Remote wipe

Under control of IT

No matter the storage solution used, Nextcloud can ensure corporate policies are followed. Sharing can be restricted through the file firewall, filtering on user properties like location or group, or file properties like (automatically or manually) assigned tags, file type and more. With storage transparent to users, generic data can remain where it is while IT can make sure that business critical or compliance-relevant information is stored on internal infrastructure and does not leave the company. Use our secure File Drop to let customers upload files to you in an easy and secure way!

With unique layered encryptionn

Nextcloud offers a supremely easy to use, well integrated file sync and share solution with an uniquely layered approach to security. Together with the support for nearly any storage technology, it features server-side encryption and offers the ability to employ end-to-end, client side encryption for a subset of user files. Rather than making it an either-or choice, your business can rely on utmost security where it is needed but keep collaborative online document editing and full-text search on the server over the rest of the stored data.

100% visibility

Nextcloud features extensive monitoring and auditing capabilities to ensure actions of all users are transparent, both to the users themselves and to auditors.

Real-world-tested

Unlike most competitors, Nextcloud has been battle-hardened by extensive usage in a wide variety of scenarios. From an intuitive interface, crucial to keep support requests down at large universities, to extensive security features required in the financial sector, Nextcloud has been tuned to deliver what is needed to work efficiently.

Equally important, each of its capabilities can be tuned and, if needed, disabled, ensuring a minimum attack surface and less opportunities for costly mistakes.

Users can access data on a FTP drive shared with another company, fully subject to the strict control by IT; while data stored on an external object storage could be encrypted using server-side encryption so the storage provider has no way to compromise their security.

Meanwhile, files from a specific team can be enforced to be end-to-end encrypted on their clients, protecting their files from even the worst case of a full server breach.

In the back-end, IT can use a mix of local NFS or SharePoint storage, public S3 compatible storage and even blockchain technology to find the perfect mix between performance, reliability, security and cost.

The layered approach to security makes sure users have the maximum amount of productivity in their web interface while making sure sensitive data receives the ultimate protection, client-to-client. Keeping it all in a single solution simplifies management and avoids mistakes from users or IT departments that might cause costly data leaks.

With military-grade security and first-class communication and collaboration technology, Nextcloud offers the full array of functions needed to do due dilligence without giving up control over your data. Contact us today to get started!