Why On-Prem and Hybrid Faxing Can’t Compare to Faxing in the Cloud

It’s probably fair to say your organization has invested a great deal in fax technology over the years, and despite the fact that most of the rest of the world has moved on to digital faxing, some paper faxing is still necessary. Does that mean you should just live with the inconvenience? Maybe you should switch to a hybrid model? Or does it make sense to transition to the cloud? We’ll answer each of those questions in this post.

Four reasons not to stay with on-prem faxing

This is the easy part. Other than inertia, there are no reasons to continue to run an on-prem fax infrastructure. Here are a few reasons:

1. Fax servers and desktop fax machines depend on the plain old telephony service (POTS), and the FCC is requiring telecom carriers to phase out their POTS services this year. Even if a few carriers don’t comply right away, your network is going to become less reliable and more challenging to manage.
2. Your IT department should not be spending time keeping fax servers operational with up-to-date cards and software licenses, purging data to keep fax hard drives from filling, monitoring and replenishing toner and other supplies, and monitoring usage levels to anticipate capacity needs.
3. Fax troubleshooting is a waste of time. People dislike using faxes, and the people who have to try to figure out why a fax won’t go through or wasn’t received dislikes it even more. 
4. The technology isn’t just old, it’s ancient. Fax machines are a holdover from the 1980s, and they depend on telephony infrastructure launched in the 1880s.

Four reasons hybrid faxing is not the answer

So, on-prem faxing isn’t the answer for a litany of reasons. Check. How about hybrid faxing? In theory, hybrid faxing offers in-house control with the efficiency of the cloud. But there are some problems with that theory:
 

1. Hardware limits. This model depends on in-house fax servers, so there are still tough decisions to be made about capacity (e.g., when to buy a new server when fax usage reaches the limits of your hardware).
2. Time Lost mired in the details of administrative processes. With hybrid faxing, you will still have to monitor and maintain your on-prem servers, purge and archive server data, update software, and troubleshoot problems.
3. Security – your data could be at risk. You’ll continue to face security/regulatory issues. For example, employees print faxes and delete the stored ones but don’t securely store the hardcopies. Similarly, employees might move the stored fax data to a digital location that’s not encrypted or secured. These unsecured practices open the door for third parties to steal or manipulate your data.
4. Cost Savings. You’re paying double for your faxing system with either option in comparison to faxing in the cloud. You have the expense of maintaining on-prem fax servers while paying a third party to manage the cloud component of your
   fax environment.

We told you about the downside to prem and hybrid faxing. The experts agree that cloud faxing is the smart choice. Here are seven reasons to choose cloud faxing over other options:

1. Cloud faxing has a much lower total cost of ownership. We have seen companies lower their faxing costs by 50% or more in comparison to these two other choices.
2. Cloud fax frees up your IT team to spend their time on more important things.
3. If the provider you choose has a geographically redundant network, you’ll never experience fax downtime.
4. Advanced cloud fax solutions encrypt your fax data in transit and in storage and bring your faxing processes in line with industry regulations.
5. You can scale your faxing capacity up or down as needed—no buy-or-wait decisions needed.
6. Your staff will have access to a full-featured faxing program from their desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, so they can respond quickly to incoming faxes.
7. Your employees will be delighted when you take away their clunky and high maintenance fax processes and replace them with the ability to receive, review, edit, sign, and send digital faxes from an email, a website, or their phone, while reducing their technology footprint. 

Choosing a cloud fax provider

There are dozens of cloud fax companies, but they’re not all the same. Consensus Cloud Solutions, provider of eFax Corporate, is the world’s largest and most experienced global cloud fax provider. Here’s why you should look into eFax Corporate:

Experience. Building a highly robust cloud fax infrastructure isn’t easy, and it’s expensive. eFax Corporate has been serving businesses continuously for more than 25 years and has invested millions in building an enterprise-caliber cloud faxing infrastructure that’s secure and reliable.

Cloud native. Most faxing platforms use the vendor’s private data centers (or a combination of those and the public cloud). These solutions are difficult and time-consuming to manage. eFax Corporate was purpose-built for the cloud, so it scales quickly, has robust redundancy, and performs better than any other cloud fax platform. 

Large network. eFax Corporate has built the world’s largest cloud fax network to establish economies of scale no other provider can match. This means a more cost-effective solution for our customers.

Full AWS integration. eFax Corporate is the only cloud fax solution fully integrated into Amazon Web Services’ Cloud. By leveraging Amazon’s reliability, scalability, efficiency, and systems uptime, we can provide the industry’s best disaster recovery, fastest fax delivery times, and the lowest cost in the market.

If your company is stuck with outdated processes like on-prem faxing or even hybrid faxing for the foreseeable future, think about moving to the cloud. eFax Corporate can lower your costs, free up IT for more important projects, and make your
employees happy.