The cloud just makes everything better. Instead of radio or an iTunes library, many people are discovering the joy of using a cloud-based music service such as Pandora (News - Alert). Instead of hosting their own email server, many businesses have learned that cloud-based email offerings make more sense. The same is happening with data storage, computing power, even infrastructure—and fax is no exception.
Using a cloud-based fax solution and leveraging a fax-over-IP (FoIP) solution such as AudioCodes’ (News - Alert) fax ATA offering can have substantial benefits for a company. But is it the right choice?
Here are six questions you should ask before moving your business to a hosted fax service:
How many faxes are sent each day? Fax volumes often go unnoticed, but it certainly doesn’t go unnoticed by the telephone wires that serve traditional fax use. This use can strain the capacity of a business, and require constant monitoring unless something like FoIP is used (since it leverages the Internet).
Are there peaks and valleys in fax use? If there are times when volume is heavy an others when it is extremely light, FoIP and a cloud solution make a lot of sense because there is less need to buy and maintain equipment that is only sometimes used; a business can scale as needed with cloud offerings.
Is the organization distributed or single-location? Having infrastructure centralized in one place is a lot less useful for businesses that have remote offices than a cloud solution. With a cloud-based fax solution, businesses can use the same service for all their locations—no matter where the offices are located.
What is the per-page fax cost? It is a simple question, but many businesses do not know this magic number because it can be challenging to accurately assess the per-page cost given that the total cost of fax includes hardware costs, maintenance, electricity, telephone lines, and employee time. With a hosted solution, however, it is much easier to assess the actual cost—and usually cheaper.
Is your business using voice-over-IP (VoIP)? If your business already has made the move to Internet-based calling via VoIP, it makes a lot of sense to do the same for fax by using FoIP because you already have the IP infrastructure in place. Why support both traditional telephone infrastructure as well as IP-based communications?
Is there a backup plan for downtime? Disasters happen, whether the unplanned downtime is a natural disaster or something a little more man-made like a downed telephone line. One advantage of a hosted FoIP solution is that even when service is disrupted, the cloud-based, Internet nature of hosted FoIP enables businesses to redirect faxes easily and keep on humming even in the face of downtime.
The cloud delivers many benefits, and fax is no exception. After answering the above questions, it will be pretty obvious whether or not it is time to make the jump to cloud-based faxing.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson