Corporate compliance regulations require organizations to be more efficient and transparent, requiring executives to run their organizations more securely to enhance service as well as ensure privacy and security. Globally, today’s compliance regulations call for companies to adopt a cohesive strategy to ensure compliance and control are a part of day-to-day operations. In fact, the number one driver for replacing fax machines with fax server software is most often regulatory compliance. 

 

In a recent interview with Geoff Anderson, senior product manager at Open Text, he explained how enterprise fax over IP helps companies remain in compliance of the standards that govern their business.

 

“First, the use of a fax server provides a level of security and audit traceability that ensures an outside audit will go well. The goal is to take the stress away from at least producing documents and audit trails from your faxed documents when you hear the dreaded ‘audit’ [word],” he said. “Many of the pressures of regulatory compliance are growing after a period of relaxing through the 1980’s and 1990’s. Today the pressures of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other privacy concerns are driving fax server utilization. When you converge that with the mainstream internal telephony of VoIP, it is natural to think of an end to end IP solution. Why keep analog PSTN connections for legacy fax connectivity at all? Usually it is just a forgotten detail in the migration.”

 

Regulations dictate that companies physically protect information and provide a history of what happened to the information and who has had access to it. According to Anderson, Open Text’s Right Fax help make these documents more secure and produce an audit trail.

 

The fax server by its nature, he said, centralizes and collects the information that is needed for regulatory compliance. 

 

“It does this by first centralizing, at least conceptually, the receipt of faxed documents. Thus they are not by default printed to an inbox, and thus visible for anyone who might walk by. This has been a major driver in the past for sensitive groups to have a dedicated fax line, and a machine in a controlled access area,” Anderson explained.

 

However, by using the inbound routing rules, and structured user accounts and access control, the fax server can process incoming fax documents and distribute them to the correct user automatically. 

 

“The architecture is slightly different than e-mail, where the message is forwarded to the user, but instead it is more of a link to the saved document on the image directory of the fax server. Thus regardless of what the user does with the document – and your policies dictate that – the ability to keep a copy of any fax received is inherent in the system,” he added. “This image repository has a rich set of rules that can be applied against it to ensure retention, and destruction policies are well defined, and meet your internal requirements for regulations.”

 

A significant advantage of Open Text Fax Server, is that faxes are digitally protected, helping to prevent loss or unauthorized viewing of documents. In addition, logging and auditing features provide the ability to review and track all faxes from sender to recipient.

 

“It is not uncommon for larger enterprises to have large fax server implementations, often with multiple servers, and to practice load balancing, or least cost routing. In such cases, the servers may be in different geographical locations, but the same principals apply, and the repositories of the fax documents are still managed as if they were in one central place,” Anderson added.

 

Open Text, which has sold more than100,000 fax servers globally, is a market leader in enterprise fax over IP and focuses on helping organizations reduce costs associated with standalone fax machines, integrate with existing VoIP and infrastructures and securely deliver business critical documents.