With security issues at the forefront of many businesses' minds, organizations can be reluctant to adopt new technology for sending messages that include sensitive information. Organizations that deal with large amounts of information that needs to be closely protected, such as the armed forces, often stick with traditionally trusted methods of communication. However, continuing to use outdated technologies will become more difficult as requirements and vulnerabilities evolve.
Human error can exacerbate the weaknesses of legacy technologies. This reality was evident in a recent high-profile military case, when a Department of Defense investigation into a lost Medal of Honor recommendation revealed that the nomination packet had been lost in an email inbox four years earlier, Ars Technica reported.
Army Captain William Swenson was recommended for the medal after he risked his life to recover wounded and dead soldiers in Afghanistan in September 2009. The report found that the team at U.S. Forces Afghanistan responsible for awards "had inadequate systems and unreliable processes, which may have contributed to the failure to fully process Captain Swenson's MoH recommendation."
Swenson, the first living serviceman to receive the medal since Vietnam, was finally awarded the MoH in October 2013. He went unrecognized for four years because the paperwork recommending him for the award disappeared and there was no record of where it went. It was originally stored in an email at USFOR-A headquarters, but due to multiple levels of bureaucratic red tape, it was lost.
Flawed messaging practices
The original DoD recommendation was that Capt. Swenson's medal package be sent up the chain of command to the president as quickly as possible, but it hit a few snags along the way. When it was first submitted in December 2009, the packet was sent as collection of attached documents in a digitally signed email from Swenson's task force to the command group at Bagram Air Base.
At each level of command the documents were printed out to be reviewed, marked on paper and then scanned to be reattached and sent on to the next person. The repeated scanning and printing caused some major hold ups in the process. Then deputy commander for support at USFOR-A Timothy McHale told the Inspector General's team that "some units submitted electronic copies, other used hard copies, and they often used the wrong endorsement chain." McHale went on to say he recalled times when he had to ask for awards packages to be redone because multiple scans and printings caused documents to be illegible.
After a document was scanned, the hard copy would be destroyed, as it often contained classified details about operations and personal information of the soldiers nominated. As a result, the electronic version was the only copy, and it only existed from email to email. This proved problematic when all Army email records were lost in 2012. Messages had been stored on hard drives in Outlook .pst files, which were all deleted during an operating system update.
An officer with Combined Joint Task Force 1 told investigators that lost award packages became an increasingly common problem. "It got to the point where we were having so many awards that were being misplaced, lost, whatever you want to call it, that I made them CC me on the emails they sent up." That way, there would be at least some sort of record when each package was submitted.
Protecting secure documents with FoIP
Employing a fax over IP solution would have reduced these problems dramatically. First, the security worries that caused many of the issues would have been eliminated, as FoIP utilizes the cloud to keep information secure. When a fax is sent, the contents within are stored in a data center and protected with back end encryption. Additionally, because FoIP employs the cloud, every fax that is sent is saved on an organization's dedicated server, creating an archived database of past messages. This allows for records to be stored securely without the need for hard copies.
Secondly, document legibility would no longer be an issue, as FoIP doesn't require scanning, which can distort images. Every time a fax is sent it looks just as the original document did, eliminating the hold ups and delays related to illegible paperwork.
Finally, fax over IP's streamlined platform would have created a simple, completely integrated process that could be used by all levels of command, making it easier and faster to send documents along once they were reviewed. Faxes can be sent to either a fax machine or an email, or both, allowing for each party to receive messages in the way they prefer while still offering the security and reliability of a traditional fax.
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