Businesses tend to have a love/hate relationship with email. While it facilitates the sending of important messages and files, it tends to do so in an ineffective way. Yet it continues to see usage in countless companies around the world because no one seems to have any new ideas.
But maybe the answer to these issues doesn't come directly from recent technology. Rather, the solution starts with looking at older practices that still work. In the instance of email, this means examining its predecessor – the fax machine. Fax technology is still very useful – not to mention required by law in some industries. The hardware that is associated with it, however, hasn't meshed well with the era of mobility. By taking fax servers, however, and replacing the endpoints with online portals and software-defined environments, it is possible to do away with email almost entirely.
Email does no favors
Let's pretend for a second that email is a secure channel. Generally it is avoided because of the weak encryptions that are commonly found protecting it, but for the sake of argument let's say those aren't a factor. Even if you could trust it, the way that inboxes are commonly laid out tends to not be conductive to productivity. According to CloudTweaks contributor Steve Prentice, getting buried under an avalanche of difficult-to-wade-through messages "is a typical situation at thousands of organizations across the world, daily."
"[Companies] face the challenges of doing business in an increasingly crowded and competitive workspace, yet the mindset stays rooted to a great degree in the past where email rules," Prentice wrote. "Imagine if one of these managers stopped to look at what was going on right in front of them: Why are there so many emails being sent? How much is each of these emails costing in terms of lost productivity?"
Prentice believes that it's time to start moving away from email and to embrace cloud-based solutions. There are an increasing number of businesses that are starting to realize this fact – something that recent findings from CompTIA would support.
Almost all businesses use cloud in some way
Organizations are seeing the light in cloud assets. According to Virtualization Review, CompTIA found that more than 90 percent of companies have adopted some form of cloud computing. It's more than likely that some of them have done so in order to decrease their dependence on email.
Once such strategy that includes cloud-based faxing comes in the form of separating messaging from attachments. Prentice stated that enterprise conversations are better suited as ongoing threads where everyone can connect. Filesharing and attachment sending need their own siloed location. This cuts down on clutter and confusion for everyone involved.
"Stepping away from email and into the cloud means more productive work delivered by more engaged employees, no longer distracted by the typewriter-like formality singularity of the email message," Prentice stated.
Time for cloud-based fax
Email has been at the root of some pretty nasty data breaches. The channel can be hacked with great ease and even turned against its users – information can be collected from messages and re-purposed to create convincing phishing scams. So why are enterprises still trusting it?
The only way to do away with email is to provide effective alternatives – cloud-based faxing being the best of the bunch. The security of fax servers combined with the mobility of cloud solutions is a powerful way to increase productivity across the board.
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