Relative to the many demands on today’s IT teams, spending capital, time and resources to maintain physical fax servers and infrastructure is not a high priority. But fax capability remains a business need because many established industries — such as legal, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing — are dependent on the security, reliability and process integration of their fax infrastructure.
Many of these organisations are facing some critical questions:
In the case of “Private Cloud” faxing, a company’s fax infrastructure is maintained entirely within its firewall. In this model, whether the business maintains a fax server in-house or a fax server running on a virtual machine, the IT group owns primary responsibility for maintaining, licensing, troubleshooting and upgrading this business’s fax infrastructure.
In theory, the Hybrid Cloud model for enterprise faxing combines the best of both worlds — allowing IT to maintain control through on-premises fax servers, but also using a cloud-based “backfill” component, for example, for failover, should your onsite fax infrastructure fail or have peak volume spikes, resulting in outages or busy signals. This is, by definition, a compromise from an economic and productivity perspective.
A Cloud Fax model is, technologically speaking, the most advanced enterprise fax solution — fully hosted offsite and requiring only an email address and Internet connection to send and receive faxes. The Cloud Fax model can provide many of the control and customisation features of both “Hybrid” and “Private” fax solutions — such as integration into Multifunction Printers and workflow integration – such as SAP or Electronic Patient Records systems with flexible APIs and enhanced Transport Layer Security (TLS) to protect sensitive data. Additionally, with the right vendor, the Cloud Fax model can provide rapid scaling ability — essentially a pay-as-you-go model.
The key to your success, if outsourcing is the right call for your enterprise, is to ask the right questions and select the right cloud fax provider.
We’ve helped hundreds of large enterprises transition from fax servers to a cloud fax model. Talk to us about your needs today.