Faxing in the Cloud – Five Things Your Business Needs to Know
Cloud faxing, also referred to as online or virtual faxing, is the twenty-first century’s iteration of the beloved office fax machine – that microwave-sized piece of equipment that was at one time the crown prince of real-time document transmission. But like many office technologies before it, faxing has undergone an overhaul in terms of its functionality and the result is what we now call cloud faxing.
Uncover how cloud fax can enhance security and create efficiencies in your business’s document transmission process. Speak to a Cloud Fax Specialist.
Cloud faxing essentially eliminates the need for an actual fax machine and the numerous administrative activities and expenses — both time and money — that onsite machines require. Savings include a drastic reduction of paper and ancillary expenditures such as ink and routine maintenance, and also streamlines your document transmission process into a secure digital environment with increased efficiency and productivity.
Finally, cloud faxing significantly expands your capabilities for handling a high volume of inbound and outbound transmissions as well as providing a reliable and safe data storage option that is easy to access and intently monitored for purposes of security.
In this entry, we will quickly explore some of the main reasons that cloud faxing is beneficial to your organization’s business model.
Number One – Enhanced Security
If your organization still requires faxing technology, you are likely handling sensitive data such as medical records. And if you are handling that data through paper, your exposure for accidentally leaking classified material is increased. Cloud faxing can offer numerous security benefits such as:
- A reduction in physical documents which can easily be copied, left sitting out, or improperly distributed
- Authentication of all users before being granted access to sending or viewing documents
- Encryption of documents being sent or safely stored on the cloud platform
- Twenty-four hour monitoring against cyberattacks or service interruptions
Number Two – Reduction of Maintenance and Upkeep
Older fax machines can create unnecessary expense. There is the obvious hard cost associated with large amounts of paper and toner, but also consider the inefficiency of sharing important information through physical documents. Pages may get lost or thrown away and that’s a time expenditure that can have larger repercussions. Then there is the expense of shredding and recycling services that can directly impact profitability if your organization is heavy on the use of paper.
Physical fax machines are inherently prone to breaking down, and when they do, you incur the cost of getting them back online quickly; or worse, replacing them entirely. With cloud faxing, your new digital platform removes the need for machines entirely which means no more repairs, jams, software patches, or tech updates.
Number Three – Reliability and High Availability
Concord Cloud Fax platform utilizes its own Active-Active architecture. This means that we control two datacenters which actively operate identical redundant services, at the same time. This achieves a high level of availability and effectively balances large loads of data — with each data facility scalable to beyond peak capacity. The network routes inbound and outbound fax traffic to the target data center based on a criteria that ensures maximum throughput with minimal response times.
If one datacenter should become unavailable, the Active-Active architecture automatically routes all traffic to the second datacenter, side-stepping service disruption. This also means that there is no need for manual intervention to migrate your account to a back-up facility or physically reroute your fax numbers. Your users will be completely unaware of any of this activity because their inbound and outbound targets will receive their documents without a hitch.
Number Four– Reduction in Costs
The profitability in a fax machine is not in the purchase of the machine itself, but in the prolonged indirect costs such as ink, toner, and maintenance. In addition to these indirect costs, older fax platforms all incur large monthly expenses from their need for traditional telephony partners. By utilizing the cloud to fax your important documents, you no longer carry the expenditures for keeping your machines running smoothly, nor do you rely on the limitations of your own telephony infrastructure to scale your input and output accordingly. And should you have spikes in activity, your capacity to handle a flurry of traffic is already securely in place.
Number Five – Enhanced Capabilities
While Concord Cloud Fax is ideal for sending and receiving important information, our platform also provides resources for real-time status updates, data extraction, and, document workflows. This comprehensive approach allows our clients to easily monitor their inbound and outbound fax traffic, ensuring daily operations are streamlined and void of excessive costs and distractions.
In addition to these practical applications, cloud fax provides the reassurance that all of your documents are reaching their destinations with speed, security and efficiency — all of which are critical to a company’s sustained success.
To learn how Concord Cloud Fax can be tailored to your organization, talk to a Concord Cloud Fax specialist.
Uncover how cloud fax can enhance security and create efficiencies in your business’s document transmission process. Speak to a Cloud Fax Specialist.