When it first appeared in the public sphere, the cloud was considered an alternative to traditional computing. But as more people have come to understand what the cloud is and how it can be used, the phrase "cloud computing" is becoming a tad redundant. The cloud is no longer a fun bonus – it's an expectation. According to CloudPro contributor Caroline Donnelly, Amazon Web Services vice president Andy Jassy even went so far as to refer to cloud as "the new normal" at a recent press event. The sizes of the companies that are pursuing the cloud have become irrelevant. Every company has a need for the cloud in some way – whether they are able to recognize this fact or not.
The cloud is one of the most popular, sought-after technologies out there today. There are very few limits to what cloud computing can accomplish in the enterprise, and much of this success comes from the cloud's ability to foster evolution in traditional business practices. A great example of this comes in the form of cloud-based faxing. Because it is still such a vital technology but remains tied to legacy hardware, faxing is caught in a strange crossroads within many industries. Taking the concept behind the fax and pushing it into software and online environments allows the channel to function in the ways that modern professionals need it to.
Cloud heralded as tech to watch in 2015
As if there wasn't enough talk happening regarding the cloud, Gartner recently put out its top 10 technology trends for 2015. As TechRepublic contributor Michael Kassner put it, the coming year is expected to be "all about the cloud."
"Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style," said Gartner vice president David Cearley. "While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud."
One way that many organizations will try to get their workloads into the cloud has to do with faxing. Fax machines are still highly in use today for a number of reasons – many of them having to do with the channel's security in relation to email. It would be considered risky behavior to transmit sensitive documents as email attachments when weak encryptions make this connection easily – and frequently – hacked. But people still tend to engage in this behavior due to the sheer convenience that email has over traditional fax machines. After all, fax machines aren't the most portable pieces of hardware out there, but they are still essential for the protections they can provide. By supplying professionals with the ability to send and receive faxes through smartphones, tablets and the cloud, it will be possible to enable the secure mobility that present-day employees are starting to require.
The great cloud rush
More organizations are trying to figure out ways in which they can harness the cloud. Now that it is becoming an expectation, an increasing number of companies are experimenting with different ways that it can streamline workloads.
"It seems pretty apparent at this point that cloud has become the new normal," Jassy said at the recent AWS event. "Companies of every size are deploying new applications by default to the cloud and large companies are trying to work out how to migrate more of their applications as fast as possible to the cloud," he added.
One of the best ways to get on the cloud wagon is to seek out online fax services. There is a need for secure document transmission these days, and email just isn't going to cut it. Remote access to resources can only be obtained if the cloud is in play. For faxing to be as useful as it is necessary, the cloud will be an important tool to have on an organization's side.
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.
