Your data room is an exclusive due diligence tool that offers organisation, structure, and ease of use for a long and complicated process. When it comes to M&A tenders, capital raising and other corporate events, there are many documents that need to be reviewed before a decision is made. Making sense of all this information is a time-consuming task and prone to error.

There are many options that can make reviewing more efficient. One of the most effective features is a powerful Q&A feature which allows you to add comments, questions, and answers in real-time to all documents within a data room. The other is a range of security options, including fence view, screen-locking and encryption. These will help to prevent unauthorised access and lower the risk of cyberattacks, or breaches that could occur once sensitive data leaves the firewall of your company.

Granular permission settings are an additional important feature. They can be applied to roles, folders and documents. For instance, you might decide to limit viewing or downloading of spreadsheets to a select group of users and provide the option for users to make notes of their own.

If you’re looking for more advanced features, search for a provider that has customized security controls. For example, iDeals www.yourdataroom.org/fundraising/ allows you to apply a custom watermark to all documents and configure a variety of user permissions including ‘view only’ modes fencing view screen blocking, remote wipe and up to eight levels of document access control. It also supports multiple languages and comes with redaction built-in.