“The fax machine isn’t working.”

“The client said they faxed us the invoice, but I’m standing at the machine and it’s not here.”

“Hey, the fax vendor called, and we need to renew our maintenance agreement.”

“Can you help us send this fax? We keep getting a ‘failed to transmit’ message.”

“The fax machine isn’t working!”

If you’re the IT professional responsible for keeping your organisation’s 14th-century faxing hardware functional, first, you have our deepest sympathies. And you’re making a smart move by looking into outsourcing the whole mess to the cloud. This offers a triple benefit: reducing your IT team’s headaches, lowering your company’s overall fax costs (and making you a hero), and giving your employees more convenient faxing capability than they’ve ever had.

But how, exactly, will you outsource your business faxing environment to the cloud? You have a few frameworks to choose from, each with its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of cost, security, reliability, and IT management. In this post, we’ll review them all—to help you decide which approach makes the most sense for your company.

Option 1: The Private Cloud

An onsite virtualised or physical fax-server solution.

With this approach, you’ll maintain your company’s fax environment entirely on-prem, within your corporate firewall—using a physical fax server or a fax solution running on a virtual machine. Either way, your IT team will be responsible for maintaining, troubleshooting, and updating the system.

Benefits:

1. Centralised control

With your legacy business fax environment, you’re likely managing a series of decentralised fax machines, possibly at multiple locations. With a private cloud, you can monitor the health of your entire on-prem faxing infrastructure in one central place.

2. Peace of mind

In terms of the security and regulatory compliance of your company’s faxes, your IT team might feel more comfortable with this more centralised administrative control. (Desktop faxes, as you know, create all manner of security and regulatory vulnerabilities for a business.)

3. Cost amortisation

If you implement a private cloud for faxing, you can leverage your existing on-prem fax servers and continue to amortise your capital expenditure for those servers over many years (assuming they remain in good health) — meaning you’ll increase the long-term ROI of your legacy fax hardware.

Drawbacks:

1. Cost prohibitive

Because the private-cloud model is still a hardware-based faxing infrastructure, this framework might be too expensive for your organisation. In addition to thousands of pounds upfront for every server, you’ll also have less-obvious expenses such as fax cards, recurring software licensing, analogue lines (yep, you’ll still need to pay the telecom provider every month), and maybe even additional costs for physically securing the servers and encrypting the data.

2. Added responsibilities

Your IT team will need to accurately predict long-term fax volume and capacity needs—by monitoring usage trends and knowing when to scale up with more servers or upgrading to the latest server software versions. This means you may need to devote resources to fax issues that would be better spent on forward-looking initiatives. And this capacity planning does not scale granularly: IT will simply need to buy new servers or risk capacity issues.

3. Security weaknesses

Although keeping fax documents “in-house” might seem like a security enhancement, many fax servers’ inability to effectively encrypt data, coupled with other drawbacks, mean this model can run into conflict with regulations like HSCIC, governing protected customer data. Also, because of the explosive growth of hosted cloud solutions, many cloud providers have stronger security measures and infrastructure in place.

Option 2: The Hybrid Model

Combining on-premise and hosted faxing

This framework gives many IT teams comfort because it offers both direct control through on-prem fax servers and the benefits of an outsourced, cloud-based faxing environment. But does it truly offer the best of both worlds? Let’s examine the pros and cons.

Benefits:

1. Added flexibility

Hybrid cloud faxing lets your IT team simultaneously oversee and manage your fax environment onsite while enjoying some of the benefits of cloud faxing, such as higher system availability and greater redundancy. (This represents an improvement over your legacy environment where, if your in-house fax server goes down, and that’s all you’ve got, your company’s fax capability falls to zero.)

2. Hardware amortisation.

Like a private-cloud faxing environment, the hybrid model also allows you to leverage the on-prem fax hardware you’ve already invested in — increasing your long-term ROI from those servers over time.

Drawbacks:

1. Double payment

With the hybrid model, your company might be essentially double-paying for your fax environment. You’re continuing to pay the internal costs of managing the on-prem fax hardware while also paying a third party to support the cloud component. (With a true cloud fax model, you could outsource the entire fax environment completely — and pay only once.)

2. Security weaknesses.

Another drawback of the hybrid model is that because its on-prem component can leave the organisation open to all of the security vulnerabilities of any legacy fax infrastructure. If your fax servers process sensitive company data or confidential customer information, your faxing processes could expose your company to security and regulatory problems.

3. Half measure?

Finally, one way to view the hybrid model is as a half measure. You’ll be freeing your IT team from only a portion of the administrative and troubleshooting responsibilities of managing your fax environment (but they’ll still need to maintain the onsite hardware). That means you’ll be benefiting only partially from being able to outsource your faxing capabilities to the cloud.

Find smart more questions to ask cloud fax vendors:
Moving to the cloud—a guidebook for IT directors

Option 3: The Cloud Fax Solution

Fully hosted, offsite faxing that requires no on-prem infrastructure.

The cloud fax model is, technologically speaking, the most advanced enterprise fax solution—fully hosted offsite and requiring only an email address and internet connection to securely send and receive faxes.

Benefits:

1. Cost savings

Cloud faxing represents a significant cost savings over the onsite-server model (and the hybrid approach as well). It frees up IT resources to focus on higher-ROI projects, and enables your organisation to retire onsite fax hardware (servers, software, fax machines, fax boards) and eliminate licensing, telecom lines, and the related costs outlined earlier.

2. Flexible expenditures

Because the service is cloud-based, you’ll be able to increase — and even decrease — your company’s fax capacity quickly, cost-effectively, and at any time. The right cloud fax solution is essentially a “pay-as-you- go” model, as opposed to a server-based system where the choices are the binary “buy another fax server now,” or “don’t buy it now, and risk capacity issues.”

3. Improved security.

The best-in-class cloud fax companies protect faxes using the most sophisticated methodologies— such as TLS encryption for transmitting faxes over the internet—and they may also have “Heavy” Tier III and IV secure data centres, the best of which maintain SOC2 or SSAE 16 Certifications to ensure customer data is protected 24/7/365 when in storage. The right cloud fax provider can also enable solutions that keep your business on the right side of HSCIC and GDPR regulatory mandates.

Drawbacks:

1. The wrong vendor

When implemented and supported properly, the pure cloud fax model represents by far the best approach for modern business faxing. But choosing the wrong partner can undermine the ability to realise all of the benefits of a cloud fax solution that drove the outsourcing decision in the first place.

Choose carefully.

2. A poor contract

When outsourcing a core business service such as fax to a third-party vendor, you should demand better service and value than your in-house team can deliver for the cost. Some providers will show you a sleek online fax interface and hope that distracts you from the fact that their agreement asks you to skimp on SLAs, reliability, security, scalability, and integrations with other workflow apps.

Conduct thorough due diligence with these vendors upfront — and, again, choose carefully.