Assessing the costs of migrating to a cloud fax solution
While fax continues to be the most-often utilized method of document exchange for enterprises in tightly regulated industries, most organizations that rely on fax would prefer to be able to modernize their current solution. In healthcare organizations in particular, the need for a paperless document exchange coupled with a desire for fax without phone lines or telephony have led an ever-increasing number of enterprises to transition to secure cloud fax solutions. A reliable web fax service gives its users the ability to share documents with organizations that are still utilizing analog document exchange methods, like traditional fax, while also digitizing users’ documents for easy internal processing. Concord can help you scope the cost of transitioning to the cloud.
Want a detailed look at how to scope costs?
If your organization is considering a switch from fax machines or on-premise fax servers to a cloud-based solution, download our full cost comparison guide for information on identifying capital acquisition costs, details on how Concord prices services like support, call-traffic, fax numbers and more, and real-life cost comparison charts for Cloud Fax implementations we’ve completed.
Three questions to ask as you scope your project:
For organizations that are beginning to scope their needs for a fully managed cloud fax solution, one of the first questions that naturally arises is, what will it cost? At Concord, we have helped construct the right paperless, electronic fax solution for countless organizations, and we are deeply familiar with the questions that need to be accounted for when assessing costs of a cloud fax solution versus costs for maintaining fax servers and fax server software.
- What’s your organization’s current method of document exchange?
- How much variation do you have in fax traffic volume?
- Will you need to scale operations in the future?
What’s your organization’s current method of document exchange?
This simple question will be the fastest way to scope whether the burden of implementation costs could apply to your organization: If your organization is currently operating its own fax servers and is considering a switch to the cloud, any implementation fees have already been sunk. There are some digital fax providers that charge set up fees, but others, like Concord Cloud Fax, have zero implementation costs associated with them. At most, you can choose to pay a small one-time porting fee to bring your current fax numbers over to our service.
If your organization is currently reliant most heavily on fax machines. and is considering between an on-premise fax server solution or a cloud fax provider, you will want to be sure that you’re aware of all implementation costs that come with purchasing fax server software. Not only are there considerable costs associated with setup, given the size and complexity of many on-premise servers, most organizations also have to hire at least one specially trained System Integrator to perform the implementations of these technologies. And because there is a significant dependency on architecting the related telephony infrastructure, sometimes more than one specialist is required to get a fax server up and running. By the time you factor in the multiple back-end integration points that are either the sources for or destinations of the fax traffic, server implementation projects can involve several outside resources to get the final solution an organization has intended.
Because of these hefty setup costs associated with fax servers, it is always more cost effective to implement Cloud Fax if your organization is moving away from fax machines.
How much variation do you have in fax traffic volume?
This question may require a bit more research into your organization’s day-to-day operations, but it is extremely telling in terms of establishing what type of solution will be better suited for your fax needs.
If you find that your organization experiences fax traffic spikes on certain days or within certain timeframes of the month, bear in mind that you will need to spend money on provisioning for those bursts. If you consider the current market leader in the on-premise fax server space, you’ll note that there are many modules and options available, providing many different ways that the server can be configured. To put it simply, however, licenses are purchased by the capacity that an organization requires. This kind of licensing model means that sufficient fax lines/channels need to be purchased for your server to handle the maximum number of simultaneous faxes that you’ll need to send or receive. Meaning, if your organization has a busy period of the month where your volume spikes significantly, you’ll need to purchase sufficient capacity to cater for that peak demand – resulting in expensive infrastructure sitting idle for substantial periods of time.
On the other hand, Concord Cloud Fax’s pricing model is pay only for what you use; we have the virtually unlimited capacity for fax volume that only the cloud can offer, and so we never make our users pay for wasted capacity.
Whether you are switching from fax machines or currently maintaining fax servers that are provisioned for traffic peaks, you will find that our pay for what you use pricing is highly efficient in cutting costs for our users.
Will you need to scale operations in the future?
The final question to pay attention to in assessing costs for a fax solution takes into account the future of your business. Of course, the goal of every business is to grow—but take time to assess your business’s trajectory and goals for growth. Companies experiencing minimal or no growth over the next five to ten years will likely not lose out on money by utilizing an on-premise solution in that time. But organizations that are anticipating growth periods will find considerable cost savings by utilizing a cloud fax service.
Adding onto a fax server that is already licensed and operating, or even trying to build out redundancy for it, is a complex and costly endeavor: Generally speaking, Organizations that are attempting to scope the increased cost and complexity of building a redundant architecture can often expect to invest an additional 50% – 100% of the original software license cost in order to build a high-availability server architecture that mitigates some – but not all – of the single-point of failure risks.
On the other hand, with Concord, it’s easy to add more users or scale up your fax volume: We’re always provisioned for our users’ growth, and adding new users can be done quickly through our self-service portal.
Each year, more enterprises seek out cloud fax solutions as a way to bridge legacy, paper-based document exchange methods with the future of all-electronic documents. 2020 has been no exception to this growth, as healthcare systems in particular continue to make strides in eliminating paper.
Download our cost comparison guide
If your organization is considering a switch from fax machines or on-premise fax servers to a cloud-based solution, download our full cost comparison guide for an idea of what you can expect in scoping project costs.
What’s in the guide?
- Information on identifying capital acquisition costs.
- Details on how Concord prices services like support, call-traffic, fax numbers and more.
- Real-life cost comparison charts for Cloud Fax implementations we’ve completed.
- And more!
Download the guide to scoping costs
Get the full assessment of how we scope the cost difference between managing fax servers versus utilizing Cloud Fax.