When it comes to making the switch from an on-premise fax environment to a cloud fax service, there are many factors to take into consideration including security, integration, cost, ease of transition, and more.
With a multitude of cloud fax options available, it’s important to understand which factors are most important for your organization to identify the solution that best meets your needs. This process can be overwhelming. Here are some of the key considerations to ensure the solution you choose is the best fit for your organization.
Security & Compliance
If your company relies on sending and receiving confidential data via fax, security and compliance are a top concern. Cloud faxing allows faxes to be sent to and from email (and other applications) reducing the chances of confidential documents sitting on public fax machines or MFPs. Other features such as end-to-end encryption of fax transmissions make cloud fax an integral part of a secure and compliant communications infrastructure.
Integrations
Integrating your cloud fax environment with your enterprise applications allows faxes to be directly sent to and from these applications to streamline business processes, improve productivity, and reduce manual errors. This method also allows for faster and more accurate reporting while allowing you to concentrate on your business, not on your faxing.
Cost
Your on-premise fax server may require separate security provisioning, redundancy for high availability/disaster recovery, hardware and software maintenance agreements, and more, all of which can be costly. Cloud fax eliminates many of these expenses and shifts the fax transmission costs from a per-minute to per-page cost.
Ease of Transition
One of the most common concerns about moving from an on-premise fax environment to cloud faxing is the challenge of migrating data, documents, and user accounts. Therefore, finding a cloud fax partner that can help with this migration is a key consideration.
Below are some of the specific migration services a cloud fax provider can help with.
Discovery:
- Review how users are setup
- Dialing rules and destination tables
Data Migration:
- Consider what data needs to be migrated and what can be stored
- Convert your old server to read only
User Directories:
- AD integration: outline mapping of settings for user import and integration
- Partial porting and test DIDs
Integrations:
Application specific integrations such as SAP, FileNet, and Oracle
Architecture Options
While considering different fax solutions, there are a multitude of options to choose from to fit your unique environment.
- Hybrid Fax allows your company to maintain your on-premise fax server while transmitting faxes via the cloud, eliminating all fax hardware and the cost of maintaining that hardware. This solution is ideal for companies who want to benefit from transmitting faxes over the cloud but maintain a consistent fax user interface to avoid retraining users.
- Hosted Fax replaces your current fax server with a full cloud solution. This method eliminates all hardware and software maintenance, and all telco transmission charges. This solution is ideal for organizations that need the flexibility of sending faxes from any device and with a high degree of scalability.
- Direct Fax Integration integrates your fax solution to your back-office applications. This is the ideal solution for high volume production faxing or for any application which requires sending fax documents with customized information.
With Instant InfoSystems, you’ll benefit from more than 30 years of fax expertise. As a vendor neutral organization, we can help with the complex selection process of finding solutions specific to your unique needs.
Schedule a consultation today to learn about which fax migration is best for your organization.