Why Not Move to Cloud Fax?

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

Why Not Move to Cloud Fax?

 fax in cloud 2.png

The last couple of weeks I explored the topic of SIP Trunking.   One of the benefits I discussed is that cloud based solutions can now be offered to the enterprise.  Faxing is a great solution to be offered in the cloud.  You likely still use Fax, but you likely don’t use it as often as you used to.  Let’s face it, email and digital signature technologies have impacted fax but you still need to do it sometimes.  Or as a small business you may not even have fax capability now, but you wish you did.  So you may want to have the ability to do it, but remove the headache of managing a lot of the CPE infrastructure you may have, nor may have to set up.  Cloud faxing is a great solution for both of these scenarios.

Let’s first explore why fax still exists.  Fax, like many PSTN technologies, continues to endure and keep going way past what the “pundits” may have predicted.  To me, that is because the pundits live in a very advanced world, and don’t understand how economics really shape enterprise business decisions.   And if you believe market analysts, aritzon expects the global online fax market to cross $2.4 billion, growing impressively at a CAGR close to 11% during 2016−2022.  Remember, this is the online fax market, not the overall fax market.  So even if the fax market is declining, and online is growing, that online number is a big number. 

I also figured I’d look into this through the lens of the fax machine market and whether it is growing or not.   I couldn’t really find anything online, but I did find this:   “In this report, Fax Machines market is valued at XX million USD in 2018 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023.”  So while that doesn’t say anything on the surface, it does talk about a growing CAGR.  And the fact that someone wrote a report shows that there is large market.

So no matter how you cut it, people are still faxing.

Why?  Well, first of all fax is embedded into the fabric of many operations.  They use it because they use it.  Why change it if it works?  It’s established.  You and your customers use it over and over and over and over.  Infrastructure is paid for.  In other words, it’s part of the business practice that has worked.  So why not continue to support it.

Fax is also secure in nature and that is one of the primary reasons that highly regulated industries like medical, law and insurance still insist on using it.  And fax is still a legal document for those very secure reasons.   

Hacking is also becoming a more prevalent word we hear about.  Email hacking as an example.  There are institutions where people need to get highly confidential information out to someone else, and they are choosing to do so using Fax.  And we hear about more and more examples of companies being fined because some data is not secure.   Not that fax will entirely solve that problem, but if there is a highly confidential document, fax might be a way to get this around securely.

Fax has also been adaptable.  Like voice, fax has moved to IP or Fax Over IP (FoIP).  As the transport infrastructure has changed from TDM to IP, but not the business practice that utilized fax as an embedded part of the business practice, fax has adapted to IP.  

So your businesses need it.  But why deal with the cost of maintenance on the fax machines or MFPs?  So move your faxing abilities to the cloud.  Sangoma offers a SIP cloud based fax service called FaxStation.

 



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