With technology creeping into every aspect of life, email can sometimes seem like the obvious choice when it comes to sending and receiving information. While it's true that this form of document exchange is extremely convenient, email is still lagging behind fax over IP in many areas. FoIP and faxing in general are nowhere near "dead technologies," and can in fact still do quite a bit more than email.
To that end, we've put together this list of four things FoIP and fax services can do that email just can't:
1. Add a personal touch
Keeping things personal is really difficult in this age of tweets and text messages. When someone's birthday rolled around you grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and spent some time making sure that person understood how much they mean to you. It didn't matter if your handwriting was messy, or if you had a few grammatical mistakes here and there. The message was totally your own, and the recipient could really feel how much effort you put into it.
Nowadays, the most intimate thing you can do for someone is send an email with a few emojis you know they like. Wouldn't it be great if you could have the convenience and speed of email, with the personal touch of a handwritten letter?
Well, you can. With FoIP, you can write your letter with all the love and care you normally would have and then use a fax machine to instantly send it to their email. FoIP allows them to see all of those wonderful little idiosyncrasies that make your handwriting totally your own, without having to wait a few days for the letter to reach them in the mail.
2. Get creative
When you want to send a creative or fun message to someone via email, your options are pretty limited. You can either spend a lot of time scanning that picture you just drew into your computer and formatting it correctly for email or just utilize pictures and content created by someone else on the Web, thereby negating the whole point of being creative in the first place.
With a solid FoIP system in place, you can send that amazing sketch you just made directly to the emails of friends and family. No muss, no fuss and no wasting of your creative potential.
"Cybercriminals are costing the global economy about $400 billion every year."
3. Avoid email-based scams
Cybercrime has become a huge problem in recent years. A 2014 report compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that cybercriminals are costing the global economy about $400 billion every year. These malicious individuals are constantly working to try to steal your personal data, and one of the ways they go about doing that is scamming you via email.
Things like phishing schemes, where the hacker sends an email posing as a reputable source such as Facebook or a bank to ask for sensitive information, are a huge blight on modern society. Email is a great place for hackers to hatch these kinds of scams due to the extreme convenience it affords. A cybercriminal can send out hundreds or thousands of emails extremely quickly, playing the numbers game to steal sensitive information.
This is yet another area where FoIP prevails over email. Having an online fax service in place is great because there aren't any malicious links to click, as well as the fact that hackers generally avoid fax. They consider it entirely too inconvenient to complete their scams, and you can rest assured your FoIP system will likely never become the victim of a phishing attempt.
4. Follow compliance standards
Anyone working in an industry with strict standards knows just how terrible email alone is when it comes to meeting compliance. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for example, has extremely stringent rules for the sending of confidential patient information. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that the exchange of health data through a digital avenue "can only be achieved if reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards are in place."
As discussed in the previous item, email simply isn't a safe and reliable way to transport sensitive information. Health care documents have a lot of personal data contained within them, and using email to send them to and from different professionals is just asking for trouble.
FoIP, on the other hand, doesn't have these security problems and spectacularly meets all of the HIPAA compliance standards. Being able to fax from the Internet affords health care professionals the convenience of email, while ensuring the safety of the documents that they're sending. FoIP really is an amazing technology with capabilities that email simply can't match.
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.
