There are two very important aspects of business communications in modern times. For one, things need to be secure. Sometimes it seems like there is a new data breach being reported every day, and companies are struggling to keep tabs on their sensitive information. The other essential quality of effective enterprise tech is mobility. Investments in new IT assets now will generally be responsible for facilitating remote work or else need to be available beyond the office walls.
Security and mobility need to go hand-in-hand for business tech, yet many of the tools that are commonly leveraged are not both of these things. A prime example is email. Sure, it's easy to access and popular in use, but the security practices that are frequently put in place around email channels are weak and easily circumvented. Between improper password construction and the ability for anyone to send a message to whoever's address they may have, email is looking increasingly inappropriate for business.
This is why email should be re-evaluated as an enterprise channel. While it may be impossible to eradicate it from offices everywhere, there should still be a conscious effort to instill best practices in staff members and provide them with effective alternatives. One such resource is faxing, which is inherently more secure than email but has long suffered from aging hardware that is not readily usable on the go. The solution here is to take the concept of faxing and create software around it. Placing this application in the cloud essentially puts a fax machine right in the hands of workers and allows them to take it anywhere they might need it.
Cloud-based fax is an incredible way to unlock secure mobility for employees. Countless documents of a delicate nature are sent across the Internet every day, and their protection is of the utmost importance.
Fax still widely used
Fax machines have not gone away, despite what any stand-up comedian with a joke about the '80s has to say about it. Because faxing is considered safer than email, it is still required by mandate in fields like healthcare. For reasons like these, TMCnet senior editor Peter Bernstein stated that considering fax to be dead is "extremely premature."
"The facts about fax are that it is still used millions of times per day worldwide," Bernstein wrote. "Not only does it continue to leverage the ubiquitous communications capability gained from being connectable via telephone numbers, but in case you have not been paying attention, you don't need a fax machine anymore to send and receive facsimiles and the Internet is now very fax-friendly. Indeed, fax functionality, because of its integration with unified communications (UC) capabilities and especially email, is as vibrant as ever."
Cloud-based faxing is a very modern way to manage transmissions of sensitive materials. Files are sent and received in the exact same manner that they would be over traditional fax machines, but are delivered directly to and from mobile devices instead. This doesn't mean, however, that these missives cannot be shot out to other recipients that lack cloud fax capabilities. This hardware can still interact with touchscreen endpoints as if there were no difference between the two. On top of all this, cloud fax can even deliver documents to email accounts. While this is possible, it is advisable not to initiate fax-to-email communications when sensitive information is being handled. This opens up the data in question to a wider variety of leak and breach possibilities.
Cloud fax becoming essential
It is impossible to overstate the importance of security and mobility for workplace technology. Professionals need to be enabled and protected as they continue to use their mobile devices for an increasing number of tasks. This is why software-defined fax, when based in the cloud, can be a boon for productivity and innovation. It allows for access from anywhere at any time and has far greater protections than email ever has.
"In short, fax is something to leverage and not obsolete, and understanding how and why can be extremely valuable to your organization," Bernstein wrote.
Enhance enterprise communication, collaboration and compliance efforts with a proven FoIP solution from FaxCore. Contact FaxCore today to learn more about their 'Partly-Cloudy' fax solutions.
