If you’re a corporate IT professional, you know that for better or for worse (and honestly, just for worse), we’re all still stuck with faxing to transmit many of our companies’ most sensitive and regulated documents.
The good news is that you aren’t stuck with 1980s technology—greying fax machines, analogue lines, filthy ink drums, reams of paper—to manage your company’s faxing environment. The right cloud fax solution lets you outsource everything to the cloud, allowing your staff to receive, edit, forward, send, and electronically sign faxes from any internet device.
But the key phrase is the right cloud fax solution. There are a lot of them out there—some new and inexperienced but doing their best, others little more than a website run by a few programmers leveraging the public phone system to offer minimal fax functionality. You need to know how to identify these businesses, cross them off your list, and narrow your search to cloud fax providers that have been successfully, securely, and reliably transmitting enterprise customers’ faxes over the internet for many years.
Here are a few questions to ask vendors that will help you find the right solution quickly.
1. How long have you been in business?
Because cloud fax has proven such a lucrative line of business—hey, you’re looking into signing up, right?—more entrepreneurs are jumping into the field every year. But before you conduct a casual search and sign up with the first “ScreamingFastFax” or “FaxAwesome” you come across, take the time to dig into these companies’ histories. Often you’ll find they just rolled out their fax app recently.
Ask any potential vendor how long they’ve been continuously operating as a cloud fax provider. Sometimes you’ll find a company that has had a regional telecom service for years and just added cloud faxing to create a new revenue stream. That’s smart on their part. But will they know enough about how to securely transmit your fax documents or to make sure their processes align with your industry’s data privacy laws?
You’re looking for years — ideally, decades — of enterprise cloud fax experience.
2. Will you take responsibility for securing our fax data?
The big cloud service providers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft — take very little responsibility for the security of their customers’ data. As an example, here’s what Amazon writes on its Data Protection at Amazon Web Services page.
“With AWS, you control your data by using powerful AWS services and tools to determine where your data is stored, how it is secured, and who has access to it.”
If you’re planning to entrust your sensitive fax data to a large telecom, will they take a similar stance? You need to ask. You’re looking for nothing less than a promise to safeguard your electronic fax data at all times — both in transit and at rest — using the latest security and encryption protocols.
3. What security and compliance certifications have you earned?
Here’s one easy way to narrow your list of potential vendors. The more industry and regulatory certifications a cloud fax provider has earned, the more third-party experts—focusing on security, quality control, regulatory compliance, etc.—have independently vetted that company’s processes. These certifications should increase your confidence. A few examples:
• SSAE-16 Type-2
Successfully completing this audit demonstrates the vendor takes sufficient measures to address availability, security, and confidentiality of data, utilizing robust SOC control reports.
• PCI-DSS
Certified compliance with this industry standard demonstrates that the business applies sufficient data encryption and security processes for the payment card industry. Even if your company’s faxes won’t contain credit card information, use this certification as a good indication the fax provider understands and employs strong data-security standards.
• ISO-27002
This certification indicates the vendor has been reviewed and tested against the best practices of the International Standards Organization’s guidelines for information security management practices.
• PIPEDA/HIPAA/GLBA/etc.
Finally, if your business is in a regulated industry — or if you handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII) — you want to ask a potential cloud fax vendor if their processes comply with relevant regulations, such as PIPEDA, GDPR, or HIPAA.
Your faxes will sit in digital storage, often for years, on your fax vendor’s cloud. You want to make sure that vendor secures your data in such a way that it will stand up to a regulatory audit.
Worth noting: In case you’re wondering, there is no EU-accredited GDPR certification. You should still ask your cloud fax vendor if their processes meet GDPR standards—and demand they show you exactly how—but don’t expect them to have a GDPR badge or trophy. They don’t exist yet.
Also worth noting: Although it might not be directly relevant to your fax data, eFax, the world’s most widely used enterprise cloud fax platform for 25 years, is also the first faxing solution to achieve HITRUST CSF certification — considered the “gold standard” of healthcare data security in the United States.
4. What physical security measures do you use to protect your data centres or colocations?
Although a cloud fax solution exists only digitally from your company’s perspective — as an online admin portal for your IT team and faxing apps for your end users — your fax data will be stored on physical servers controlled by the cloud fax provider. So you need to know how well — if at all — that company uses security to protect those physical locations.
You’re looking for measures such as onsite physical security guards at your vendor’s data centre, ideally at the facility 24/7. You also want authentication measures for access, such as badges, and even biometric readers like fingerprint or retinal scans. And you will want the facility under constant 24/7 video surveillance.
Finally, you’ll want storage redundancy — ideally with your data residing at two geographically distinct locations, with failover capability in the event that one data centre experiences an outage or other disaster.
5. What level of tech support can we expect?
This is another key question to help you distinguish the major cloud fax organisations from the small players and new market entrants. Only larger, more experienced cloud fax providers can offer the level of support your business deserves for a data exchange service your employees use for such important and sensitive documents.
Actually, you’ll probably want to break the general tech-support question into several specific questions, such as:
• Do you offer 24/7 technical support?
• Do you employ in-house support engineers, or outsource to a third party?
• How well are your company’s support personnel trained?
A worthy cloud fax provider will have its own tech team on the payroll—ideally enough to support multiple shifts that enable the company to provide 24/7 live support to customers.
When your employees can’t receive or send a mission-critical fax because the system is down, the last thing you want to hear when you contact the vendor for help is a voicemail message listing the company’s business hours.
