Questions About Cloud Fax Solutions You are Too Afraid to Ask

Cloud fax solutions, technically speaking, are the most updated forms of enterprise fax. Fully hosted and offsite, they only require an internet connection and your corporate email address to send and receive faxes. An ideal fax model gives your organization a wide array of customization features of private and hybrid solutions, including multifunctional printers and workflow incorporation via flexible APIs.  With improved Transport Layer Security, cloud fax helps to protect critical information. Moreover, an excellent provider ensures rapid scaling ability, basically as a pay-as-you-go solution. This translates to significant cost saving over your onsite server model.

Your IT department will also be freed of some responsibilities and can concentrate on higher ROI projects. If you want to withdraw from onsite fax hardware such as fax boards, fax machines, and server software, a cloud fax model is just what your company needs. Think about the many costs you can save, including everything from telecommunication line expenses to licensing. To enjoy these benefits, you need to outsource services to the best cloud fax company out there. But, there are a few questions you need to ask the provider.

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What is Your Network Infrastructure Like?

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Let the provider explain the network architecture in details. A proven and successful company like mFax has invested in e-fax technology to help organizations handle thousands of faxes every day. Their colocation data centers comprise heavy sites, each supporting countless individual fax numbers backed by tight cybersecurity and redundancy-based fault tolerance.

Can the Solution Merge with the Current Information Systems?

Shifting to web-based faxing such as the services offered with Nextiva’s Auto Attendant shouldn’t be a stumbling block but rather an easy transition with little or no downtime. Ask your provider if they cater to the right APIs to connect the existing data systems without presenting new challenges to your IT team. When it comes to online fax, the migration from an old to a new system is usually a seamless and quick process. Competent providers handle everything and provide technical training and logistical support to your IT staff every step of the way.

Is There a Plan for Disaster Recovery and Redundancy?

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The most appropriate internet fax service sends and receives electronic faxes by email while assuring the security of their storage and your accounts. However, the service wouldn’t be satisfactory if the provider fails to safeguard your faxes at multiple and redundant data centers. As such, your provider must provide comprehensive disaster recovery, failover clustering, and demand redundancy plan. 

What is the Clientele Base of the Enterprise Fax Provider?

Numerous companies are claiming to offer cloud fax services. You need to understand the real experts are serving a broad spectrum of happy clients. Be curious to know their reputation and how long they have been in service. Go ahead and ask how many clients they are currently serving, those entities’ sizes, and what industries they represent. It would help if you collected a few names of the serviced clients and call them to find out if they are satisfied with the provider.

Are the Technical and Legal Aspects Put Into Effect?

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You don’t want to hire a vendor that doesn’t comply with necessary regulations or hasn’t mastered them yet. You must comprehend specific resources to ask the right questions regarding compliance standards such as PCI, GLBA, and HIPAA. Be careful with vendors who say yes to everything about regulatory compliance without explaining. Remember, you are the end-user, and their decisions and executions will affect your business. Ensure the facilitators are fully compliant and are using the right procedures to keep you from any risk.

Is the Cloud Fax Solution Good Enough for Audit and Data Security?

Your potential online fax provider should not skimp on cybersecurity and applying the best-practice standards. Let them demonstrate what they are willing to do to meet industry standards and bring your enterprise into compliance with data regulation protocols. You need top-notch measures to maintain safety when sharing data from your workplace computers to the serves of your would-be fax company. When considering your faxes’ security, you want nothing short of the highest protocols like TLS version 1.2 and SSL.  Once received, the faxes need to be secured with at least AES 256-bit encryption at the data center on the provider’s end. Sophisticated methodologies for fax transmission over the Internet may also feature Heavy Tier III and IV data centers. They can maintain SSAE 16 Certifications and SOC 2, which are designed with safe storage in mind.

How Flexible/Scalable is the Plan?

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Here is a vital question when looking for a good cloud fax company: do they offer unlimited scalability? Will their services be relevant as your brand continues to expand with an enormous volume of fax traffic? This is one reason you need experts that have been around for years because they know the demands that come with a growing enterprise.  Since the services are cloud based, you can expand your faxing capacity at any time in a cost-effective manner. Forget other server-based mechanisms where options like a binary (buy another plan) risk your business operations. opt for a pay-as-you-go plan so they can support your venture as it scales up or whenever you need to scale down.

Online Faxing- The Best Move

Thanks to web-based faxing, you can now say goodbye to clumsy fax infrastructure, related IT bottlenecks, and capital expenditures. By freeing up the IT personnel, they will be focusing more on revenue-generating activities. Worry not because the new systems can blend smoothly with existing workflows through responsive APIs. In summary, the benefits of outsourcing to the best fax company are as follows.

  • Eradicating interoperability issues that are often associated with Fax over Internet Protocol (FoIP) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) migrations
  • Bolstering security of documents and compliance with data privacy regulations
  • Simplifying faxing, as it becomes as easy as sending emails and web browsing
  • Improving scalability, reliability, and service-level agreement uptime

Partner today with a hosted cloud fax service that is trusted by thousands of corporate institutions. A competent provider does not mind signing a business associate agreement. This means they will also be part of your crew that works hard day and night to prevent data breaches, MitM threats, phishing, SQL injection, IoT attacks, and other cybersecurity threats facing businesses today.