Cloud-based data rooms have opened a window of opportunities for launching new businesses and redefining existing approaches to enterprise management. This article will explain the peculiarities of the data room evolution.
From physical to virtual data room
In recent years, storage systems have moved beyond traditional on-premises infrastructure to various locations, including on-premises, private and public clouds. With the transition of the world to the “digital” era, not only the total amount of information has increased, but also its value. And the data must be stored somewhere. And preferably in safety, which is especially true for the business environment. After all, the loss of corporate information can turn into a devastating event for the company.
As is well known, file services are suitable for sending and exchanging large amounts of data and uncomplicated and fast teamwork. All team members have access to a common data room, and authorizations can be distributed and restricted as required. In the past, however, companies or individual employees used insecure providers or providers that did not comply with data protection regulations. Thus solutions were used that were difficult or simply impossible to control. As a result, awareness of shadow IT and the unimpeded data flow grew within the IT departments. Companies were encouraged to rely on central portals – enterprise file sync and share solutions.
Nowadays, cloud technologies have received intensive development: electronic accounting, Internet banking, data backup systems, office remote services, and much more. Today virtual data room is a way to expand the IT capabilities of organizations and does not require financial investments in creating new infrastructure, attracting new staff, and retraining the old ones. The advantage of these services is that they are available in real-time via the Internet within 24 hours from anywhere in the world, and they significantly expand existing IT capabilities.
The main characteristics of the virtual data room are:
- Self-service allows consumers to request and receive the required resources in minutes.
- Universal network access. Services are available to consumers via the data transmission network, regardless of the terminal device used.
- Consolidation of resources. The service provider pools resources to serve many consumers into a single pool.
Basic aspects of the VDR evolution
Virtual data room based on cloud computing gained prominence in the mid-2000s, but it has a relatively long history. Cloud computing is based on old technologies, but the scope of these technologies remained limited for a long time, and the potential remained untapped. Almost all technologies that are part of the cloud paradigm today existed before. Still, there were no proposals on the market that would combine promising technologies in a single commercially attractive solution. And only in recent years have public cloud services appeared, thanks to which these technologies have become, on the one hand, available to the developer and, on the other hand, highly understandable to businesses.
One of the most significant technological innovations underlying cloud computing is virtualization technologies. In essence, virtual data rooms are just a paradigm shift in the creation and maintenance of IT services. Instead of creating and maintaining a separate hardware complex for each individual IT system, the company uses a virtualized pool of shared resources in which it creates the required system configurations. This concept fits all the IT tasks facing the company, only a small number of products, due to their characteristics, require separate hardware for their operation. The list of such products is getting smaller every year.