Roger --
A couple of comments quickly here:
1. Our security on the Vault uses SSL plus the Blowfish encryption algorithm. Unless you give out your password, nobody's getting in. But more importantly, hackers don't want your appraisals. They have no value at all. To use a car thief analogy, appraisals in the Vault are like a locked Yugo on a steet full of Mercedes with the windows open and the keys in them. Crooks have no interest in the Yugo.
2. No matter who may buy my company, a la mode has no rights to the data in your files, and our license agreement for the Vault makes that clear. You can rest assured that your data is legally safe, regardless of who owns a la mode in the future (yes, I'll take a big pile of cash for the company, though I've turned down several).
Last year over 6.2 million appraisals went through our EDI servers and over a million Vault files were uploaded. The infrastructure is there and it works. It is indeed easier than CD's because it's transparent, and it adds the "work at home" element that others described above.
Dave Biggers
CEO
a la mode, inc.