There have been few recent technological breakthroughs that are as disruptive as the cloud. While this is true for all manners of computing, enterprise operations have experienced some of the most notable advantages.
"From a business perspective, cloud computing is useful in a variety of ways," Dependable Solutions posted on its website. "It can, for instance, allow you to more easily grant and control access to company data, enabling easier collaboration with remote, far-flung users. It can allow your employees to more easily work from anywhere there's an Internet connection."
One channel in particular that has received a significant facelift from the cloud is faxing. Faxes are still incredibly essential missives in this day and age, but the technology remains siloed away from other outlets. As communications begin to converge on the cloud and become leveraged together in new ways, it is advisable to make the same considerations for cloud fax solutions.
Modern enterprise has needs in mobility
Smartphones have made a gigantic impact on business productivity. Now that it is possible to complete more tasks from a greater variety of places, employees are spending more time outside of the physical office and more in remote locations of their choosing. This has, however, created some interesting complications. Fax machines are not as prevalent as, say, Wi-Fi hotspots are, yet remain integral to many industries.
But according to TMCnet contributor Mae Kowalke, this is an issue that can be easily rectified through a fax over IP system. Should a staffer need to fulfill some of his or her daily responsibilities outside of the office, a proper FoIP solution can enable faxes to be sent and received within a task-specific app – or even through email. This allows not only for maximum productivity regardless of geographical location, but also assists in the organization of important messages.
"Digital faxing also is a document routing pro, able to automatically file faxes and send to multiple recipients at once," Kowalke wrote. "It also now can come with advanced document routing that directs faxes based on the content of the faxed documents. It is like having an actual person filing and delivering faxes. With optical character recognition, faxes now also can integrate with other digital processes and be searched. This makes faxes far more useful than 20 years ago, and opens up new business process possibilities."
Keeping legacy channels up-to-date
One of the biggest barriers that fax faces is its physical nature as a business communication tool. As information increasingly goes digital, having to file paper copies or take an extra step to scan a document into a system is considered incredibly cumbersome when everything else is organized so effortlessly. Fax services are still critical abilities to have, but the right steps need to be taken so that they function alongside other communications platforms.
"Businesses rely upon [faxing]," Kowalke wrote. "If it isn't broken, don't fix it. And that's what many businesses have done; faxing is integral to many business processes, and firms have continued using these processes instead of changing things and moving away from fax. Fax sure isn't as sexy as many of the technologies covered by TechCrunch and others, but it still exists and it actually is growing."
