Despite rumors that fax will one day be dead, replaced by secure email and other communications systems, so far it just hasn’t happened: As of today we see that fax remains a critical part of the corporate communications infrastructure. Helping to drive this are various compliance mandates that have been passed in recent years such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others, which require organizations to keep an audit trail of their critical communications.

What is a dying medium, however, is traditional fax, which is sent over regular copper-based phone networks and which results in tons of wasted paper. Today, organizations everywhere are migrating from traditional fax to hosted or cloud-based fax services, which are delivered via broadband, for the purpose of reducing communications costs and boosting employee productivity. With these cloud-based fax services, faxes are delivered directly to users’ email inboxes. However, unlike regular emails, the faxes are secure and verifiable.

Cloud-based Fax services are ideal for companies that have not yet made the leap to VoIP – or which have, but don’t have enough network capacity to integrate IP fax. In addition they are perfect for companies which send and receive a high volume of faxes, or which send and receive faxes from overseas locations, and are looking to reduce the cost of faxing.

You’ve probably already heard about the many ways cloud-based fax services help companies save money -- for example they boost employee productivity by significantly reducing the number of times an employee has to get up and down from their desk to retrieve faxes. They also help reduce communications costs, as broadband is used, as opposed to traditional phone service. And then there is all the savings from reduced maintenance – as we all know, traditional fax machines are mechanical devices which are prone to breaking down frequently. And then, of course, there is all the savings resulting from reduced paper usage and reduced energy consumption.

One of the often overlooked advantages of migrating to cloud-based fax is that it opens up new opportunities to integrate it with other communications applications – and here we have to mention unified communications, which involves the integration of multiple communications systems on a single platform. However it is not possible to integrate traditional fax with these new IP-based platforms. Hence, organizations which are still highly reliant on fax for mission critical communications must migrate to IP-based fax services if they are to continue to include it as a channel in their new IP-based communications infrastructure. In fact it’s been said that hosted or cloud-based fax is the number one way for companies to get faster return on investment on the IP communications infrastructure.

Recently TMC presented an informative webinar, “Moving Fax to the Cloud for Critical Business Messaging,” which covered all of the benefits of moving fax to the cloud. During the webinar, held March 3, Pamela Bernardino, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for cloud-based fax solutions provider EasyLink, and Adolf Sommella, Director of Sales Engineering , EasyLink, discussed the advantages cloud based fax services have over traditional fax. They also covered the server/device infrastructure model and its limitations; the drivers for outsourcing fax services; the hosted or cloud-based fax infrastructure model; the methodology for migrating to a hosted model; additional services offered in a hosted model; how leading companies are using hosted fax today; and how to choose the right fax services provider.

More than 100 people attended this educational event – which you won’t want to miss if you are thinking about migrating to cloud-based fax. To access the archived version of this informative webinar, click here.