In the past six months, we’ve noticed that corporations of various sizes across multiple industries have been turning to SaaS solutions to share large volumes of critical information beyond their office firewall. More specifically energy, biotech, manufacturing, health care and pension fund sectors have been actively seeking a more secure way to share and collaborate internally and with external parties. It appears that no matter what business you are in or what your businesses processes are, there is always a need to securely share large volumes of information easily and cost effectively. Email, FAX and courier are not secure enough and continue to be cumbersome and prone to error.
Historically, sharing documents online in virtual data rooms have primarily been used for due diligence in M&A , fund raising, refinancing, and real estate transactions. Corporations are now recognizing the value of sharing information online to complement or improve document intensive processes, streamlining real world business challenges such as RFPs, Engineering, Procurement and Construction compliance, financial reporting, audits, board communications or simply having an accessible repository of key legal documents. Documents are often more secure online than stored on in-house computers, flash drives or distributed as attachments using email. Using Firmex, clients organize and access literally millions of documents in a SAS 70 compliant environment with encryption transmissions, and fully segmented and secure databases with mission critical redundancy, which is often not the same environment that office computer storage provides.
Spending thousands of dollars of high-performance systems, software and security on in-house IT is no longer necessary when SaaS solutions enable customers to leverage massive economics of scale and offer them at a significantly less cost. Subscription based models are also attractive for budget conscious organizations. Offering virtual data room solutions for use within corporations is surfacing as a growth area for our company and we are confident that our solution will address real world business challenges from the time we get them up and running.