Organize your board meetings securely with a virtual Board Room

Some meetings are more important than others. Board meetings are true strategic pillars, where every bit of information given, every word spoken can influence the direction taken by the company and the results that it achieves. So, it’s important to be well prepared for board meetings and leave nothing to chance. But it’s also crucial to ensure that everything that is said, done, shared, and handed out is completely secure and confidential. That’s why you need a dedicated tool to overcome both of these challenges that your company faces when it comes to getting things organized and protecting your data. In other words, you need a digital Board Room.

Board meeting security is not optional

The responsibility for communication security for governance boards falls on directors. Beyond the problems of organizing executive board, management board, and supervisory board meetings, protecting data and documents shared in the run up to meetings and during them is the biggest challenge of them all.

The information discussed at a board meeting is absolutely crucial to a company. It could be financial or strategic data with a direct impact on the future of the organization, trade secrets or expertise that determines its commercial value, or communications between directors that absolutely needs to be kept under wraps. There is so much information circulating, which mustn’t be shared with anyone else but board members.

Board meeting communications are still largely shared on paper and by email – the two default solutions deemed to be the most straightforward and practical, especially when board members struggle to coordinate their schedules or are spread out across the world. The problem is that these two methods are highly unsecure, running the risk of data getting lost, stolen, or accidentally deleted. To guarantee that communications remain secure and confidential, companies need to turn to a cloud solution that can support the entire life cycle of their governance boards. They need a digital Board Room.

Go digital – in complete security

A virtual Board Room is a digital solution, hosted in the cloud. It has been designed specifically to meet the needs of governance boards, especially to ensure communications remain confidential before, during, and after board meetings.

The digital revolution is affecting everyone and everything, and governance boards are no exception. The switch to electronic invoicing in public procurement has allowed companies to discover the benefits of going paperless. It is only logical to want to go even further and overhaul other layers of the organization, driving virtual solutions right to the very top. Not just by using video conferencing or project management platforms for meetings, because meetings always work better in person, but by reducing the dizzying amount of paper documents circulating in the run up to meetings. On average, 12,300 pages are produced every year, just to organize these kinds of meetings.

So, going digital can seem quite the challenge. It’s not just about swapping paper documents for digital tools, such as using email instead of paper, but an entire transformation of communication and collective decision-making processes. A cloud solution such as a virtual Board Room does much more than take run-of-the-mill tasks like sending and receiving information off your hands; it allows you to go digital for your board communications, all while improving organization, simplifying processes, and securing the data you exchange.

Make your board communications simple and secure with a digital Board Room

So, now you know that a virtual Board Room helps you to digitalize vast amounts of your senior management meeting cycle by simplifying organization and reporting, while safeguarding critical data at the same time. The digital Board Room is a secure, virtual space that brings together everything to do with governance boards – documents, communications, and attendees – in a single location. It makes preliminary work so much easier (such as sending invites, viewing and editing documents, drawing up the agenda, and communications between attendees) and it’s easy to access (on desktop or on mobile). And at the end of a meeting, you can upload the minutes to exactly the same location.

The benefits of a virtual Board Room are the same as any other digital solution. Save time, storage space, and, above all, costs. On top of the courier costs you avoid, you can also save money in the long term by eliminating the usual bottlenecks that plague governance boards – attendees unavailable, documents not received, critical information lost or stolen, the list goes on.

But the main benefit of a digital Board Room is how it overcomes one of the biggest challenges of the digital revolution affecting governance boards: security. Documents are encrypted before being stored in a central location – within a virtual ‘bubble’, protected from any outside influence – and can only be accessed from a web interface or mobile app, even when you’re not online. Access is protected using a strong two-factor authentication system, with one of those factors involving the user’s electronic device, such as SMS. That means only authorized persons can access your documents.  Finally, with the SaaS solution, all documents are hosted in the cloud, in secure data centers, independent of the company’s network. No chance of any prying eyes seeing your highly confidential data!

Making the right decision for your virtual Board Room

There’s one more thing to bear in mind. When it comes to choosing which virtual Board Room solution meets the needs of your governance boards, you need to think very carefully. That means defining your selection criteria in line with the problems you face:

• Ease of use. If users have trouble with mastering the range of features of digital tools, it is better to opt for an intuitive solution, which improves productivity rather than hindering it.
• Mobility. Being able to work on the go is a blessing, but it does come with the relatively new challenge of making sure the data used is secure while traveling. A simple connection from an ill-suited terminal or through an unsecured network could have disastrous consequences.
• Geography. 34% of businesses have a multinational management board. Bringing together board members is tricky enough when they work in the same office, let alone when they are scattered across the globe.
• Security. Data confidentiality and integrity not only depend on the virtual Board Room solution you choose, but also on the solution provider’s commitments. That’s why you need to look beyond the features offered by the solution itself and scrutinize its publisher. Make sure it has adopted the security standards that are relevant to you, with ISO 27001 being the most stringent of such standards right now.

The best virtual Board Room solution is one that meets all of these criteria and is specifically designed for governance boards. That solution is BoardNox by Oodrive.

Boost efficiency and increase simplicity, without losing focus on security. That is the guarantee that comes with the BoardNox Board Room. A solution that does much more than you might imagine. A virtual Board Room is also the driver of your digital transformation, helping your company’s governance boards to lead the way in their own digital revolution and inviting every employee to get on board.