For many businesses, moving some or all IT services and functions to the cloud is a strategic way to save money, operate more efficiently, and better serve customers.  One area where cloud services make indisputable business sense is enterprise fax.

While enterprise fax might seem like a legacy technology, fax is not going away any time soon. Especially in sectors like healthcare, legal, and government where regulations demand strict adherence to privacy security standards, enterprise fax is sometimes the only communications technology that fits the bill.

Services like EasyLink’s Fax2Mail bring enterprise fax into the 21^st century with compelling, affordable paperless communications features in the cloud.   For example, with Fax2Mail enterprise fax, employees can send and receive faxes as electronic messages from existing e-mail accounts, and create digital versions of paper faxes, which can then be sent, received, edited and archived via their e-mail accounts.

Other Fax2Mail global enterprise fax cloud service features include:

1. Assign never-busy local or toll-free numbers directly to users
   
2. Manage fax accounts, user profiles and features online - globally
   
3. Send faxes directly from Outlook, Word, Excel or PowerPoint or any popular business application
   
4. Integration with virtually any application using a full suite of SOAP-based XML APIs 
   
5. The ability to distribute and share interactive PDFs

For businesses with more demanding enterprise fax needs, EasyLink also offers additional fax services functionality.  It provides additional content management, metadata, customization and workflow automation features.

EasyLink’s enterprise fax service is completely outsourced, thereby helping to align fax services with a business’s goals of reducing their IT footprint.

By migrating enterprise fax to the cloud, businesses can reduce their fax costs by as much as 70 percent by doing away with the need to support and maintain in-house infrastructure such as fax servers and fax machines, and eliminating licensing fees and telecom charges as well. Other advantages of enterprise fax in the cloud include reducing carbon footprints, satisfying corporate governance requirements, and increasing employees’ productivity. 

In addition, with the PDF Editor feature, inbound faxes received as PDFs can be searched, edited, have electronic signatures appended and more.

Fundamentally, enterprise fax in the cloud offers three key advantages:

1. Affordability – no additional capital expenses or in-house fax infrastructure maintenance costs
2. Reliability – EasyLink’s carrier-grade network efficiently and reliably processes transactions with full redundancy and scalability
3. Efficiency –completely outsourced; easy to use and manage

For companies that are spending too much money managing their enterprise fax infrastructure, looking to enhance compliance, suffering competitive disadvantage because users can’t collaborate effectively, or simply looking to offload the responsibility of managing fax services, moving to the cloud makes strong business sense. 

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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