Have you adopted a ‘cloud first’ strategy where you look to the cloud before an on-premises alternative? If you are, then according to Forbes you’re among the 80% of companies that say they are now following this strategy. There are many benefits to transitioning your applications to a cloud service provider. There are even more when you transfer your fax capabilities to an enterprise cloud fax service.
A few years ago, you may have been able to suggest that the cloud was a disruptive technology, but that’s no longer the case. The cloud has moved at an incredible pace from disruptive to mainstream to almost de facto. A good illustration of this is comes from estimates from the IDC, which show that cloud-specific spending is expected to grow at more than six times the rate of general IT spending through 2020, in pursuit of modernization and digital transformation.
While organizations concentrate on adopting cloud for their applications and systems, the same benefits that companies expect from their computing are also available for their communications. You don’t need superpowers to achieve these benefits (although, how cool would that be?). All you need is the right information to make the right decisions.
Cloud fax: Maximizing the benefits of the cloud
Let’s take a look at the common benefits of cloud computing and see how they apply to an enterprise cloud fax service.
1. Better performance
The cloud eliminates the need to build and maintain an internal infrastructure. In fact, the cloud has fewer moving parts than other IT infrastructure types and your cloud service provider is wholly focused on ensuring that its infrastructure is always performing at optimum levels. You don’t have to worry about dealing with bugs and fixes or upgrading your infrastructure to meet the latest developments and releases.
The above is also true for cloud fax. As fax volumes continue to grow for many companies, the need to move away from legacy fax machines or complex fax server infrastructures to digital fax becomes more imperative.
As enterprise cloud fax services now include all the features you’d expect from an on-premises fax server, the decision comes down to ensuring the performance of your fax capabilities over time. As I’ve covered in earlier blogs, telecoms carriers are moving to ‘All IP’ for voice and this represents a challenge for fax operations that struggle with successful faxing over an IP network. An enterprise cloud fax service eliminates all VoIP issues with multi-carrier coverage and redundancy to ensure continued performance and fax throughput.
2. Save money
Implementing a cloud service means that you don’t need to invest the hardware, software and telephony networking needed to deliver any computing or communications capability. It means you don’t need a dedicated resource to manage and maintain the system by troubleshooting failures and upgrading software, or a budget to upgrade the capabilities as new features appear. You also don’t have to over-build capacity to meet peaks in workload to avoid delays, busy signals and transmission failures. Finally, you don’t have to architect a system for fail-over and disaster recovery in the event of outages.
Cloud fax services requires zero hardware, software and telephony for faxing. It’s easy to set up and administer, allowing you to refocus precious IT resources on other strategic projects. With instant scalability, cloud capacity flexes to meet the peak demands of your fax traffic, even at its highest, with ease. Finally, business continuity is included, as cloud fax services are designed with data center redundancy, automatic fail-over and disaster recovery built into the service.
3. Stronger security
Security has always been one of the major reasons that organizations have held back from embracing the cloud. By protecting information at rest and in transit, the cloud has the security capabilities to achieve data protection in a way that’s extremely challenging for on-premises systems. The massive security infrastructure of global cloud service providers enables them to deliver a secure solution with multiple security protocols in place to protect the most sensitive of data.
Of course, security has always been one of the strongest benefits of fax. This is a communications technology that has always securely stretched beyond the four walls of your organization. Fax has security built-in and its that level of security that has ensured the longevity of this technology—especially in regulated industries. So, it is no surprise that the best enterprise cloud fax services meet—and often exceed—the highest levels of security demanded by the largest regulated corporations in the world.
4. Increased scalability
Regardless of whether you use public or private cloud providers than you are gaining access to a global infrastructure that even the largest company will find difficult replicate. It allows them to offer you a service that scales seamlessly and quickly. This is also true for your enterprise cloud service provider. Let me use OpenText as an example. OpenText™ Cloud Fax network delivers scalability and availability through five global data centers, nine co-locations and 14 points of presence for infallible reliability.
5. Improved collaboration
The cloud is made for collaboration and file sharing, and it helps internal and external partners exchange and share information. This is, of course, the primary purpose of fax. An enterprise cloud fax service extends the information exchange capabilities of fax to bring it into the digital age. It can extend the applications, such as email, and devices that fax can be accessed from so that fax can enable an increasingly mobile workforce. In addition, it can integrate directly into ERP and other back-end applications to facilitate and automate end-to-end business processes between you and your customers and suppliers.
6. Always on
There’s no doubt that many internal IT departments are very proud of the system uptime that they are able to deliver. The type of service availability that you can achieve through the Service Level Agreements with your cloud service providers of 99.5% and above are probably similar to what an internal IT team can produce. But what happens if there’s a massive failure such as a natural disaster? How quickly can you get back up and running?
An enterprise cloud fax service, like most cloud services, offers massive redundancy that means that if data center is affected by an outage for whatever reason, services resume in an at-ready secondary location. This allows your cloud service provider to deliver a wide range of business continuity and disaster recovery services designed to ensure the service continues.
Turn the power of cloud fax into your super power
The cloud is quickly moving to the center of the computing and communications capabilities for most enterprises. When implementing a ‘cloud first’ strategy, you shouldn’t overlook your fax capabilities. An enterprise cloud fax service is one of the quickest and easiest ways to demonstrate the benefits of cloud to the business.
It’s easy to see how cloud fax services can be an easy win for the cloud. It’s time you chalk up a mark in the win column and adopt the most trusted and reliable enterprise cloud fax service: OpenText™ Fax2Mail™. Take a quick look at the Fax2Mail demonstration video to visualize how your organization can start winning today—superhero cape optional.
