Need IP Fax?

These Three Questions will tell you (almost) everything you need to know.

Now more than ever, digital transformation is driving the agenda for many IT teams across the globe. As many locations re-introduce restrictions to slow the COVID-19 “second wave,” the need to embrace IP technologies – for both efficiency and cost-savings – is abundantly clear. But while much time and attention is paid to communication and collaboration solutions, fax is often forgotten – until the network changes made cause fax to fail.

Fortunately, solving for fax in your digital transformation doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, three simple questions can help you streamline your IP fax solution evaluation process and make it easier to find the right solution for your organization.

Question 1: Is the IP fax solution real-time?

There are multiple different ways of approaching IP fax, but one of the critical differentiators is real-time fax versus “store-and-forward” solutions. Simply, real-time fax acts as a conduit for the data you’re transferring, so it is never at rest from the time it leaves your facility until it reaches its destination. Store-and-forward solutions, on the other hand, store the data being transferred at an intermediary station before the message is delivered to the ultimate recipient.

The more intermediary stages in your fax transmission journey, the greater the opportunity for privacy breaches and security risks – which is bad news if you’re faxing sensitive or protected information like health or student records. If you need to fax confidential data, real-time fax is the way to go.

Question 2: Can you encrypt the fax session and media?

Legacy/analog fax solutions are less susceptible to data breaches due to the nature of the technology; but when organizations start to investigate converting their fax to IP, questions about security arise. Not all IP fax solutions approach encryption in the same way. Most do not encrypt fax or use heavy-handed encryption solutions that are costly and can negatively impact fax success rates. A light-weight AES encryption tunnel is truly the gold standard for real-time fax encryption, so if data security is important for your business, make sure you ask the question.

Question 3: Is this solution sustainable?

Sustainability for fax can mean a lot of things. First, is the solution you’re evaluating standards-based, or built on proprietary protocols, networks and technologies? Can it interoperate with various hardware and software endpoints, regardless of the vendor, to give you complete control over your IT decisions? Can the solution easily scale to meet different fax volume requirements? When you make the move to fax over IP, you want to be certain you won’t outgrow your solution or encounter fatal solution limitations in short order.

Chances are, if you’ve made it this far, it’s because your business is facing fax challenges of its own. But you don’t need to address those challenges alone. Contact Cloudli for a personalized fax assessment; as leaders in IP fax, we can help you determine how to best transition your organization to IP fax and the solutions that make the most sense for your business.