Business Fax Options: Which Is Right for You?
When it comes to business fax options, there aren't a lot of choices out there. However, that doesn’t mean you still can’t make the wrong one. eFax looks at what’s available to your company, helping you to figure out which direction to take.
Article overview:
What Are the Business Fax Options Available?
For business fax, you only really have three choices: traditional fax machines, online faxing or removing fax altogether. Each has a distinct impact on your business, and not always for the better.
Should You Keep Faxing?
Fax is an important method of communication; without it, your business could suffer. The removal of fax is not an option for most-all organisations operating in high-value industries or sectors.
Which Business Fax Option Should You Choose?
Online faxing has numerous benefits over legacy fax machines, including improved efficiency, cost-effectiveness, mobility and security. When compared, there really is no competition. The ultimate fax option for your business is always going to be digital faxing. It’s the modern alternative you need.
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Business Fax Options: What Choices Do You Have?
As far as business fax options go, your choices are fairly limited. Fax is a unique method of communication, which means there are very few ways you can go about sending or receiving a fax. That doesn’t mean there aren't great opportunities out there when it comes to business faxing, but you do really have only three options to consider:
Legacy Fax Machine
The original fax option, fax machines were popularised in the 1970s as a way of sending fax documents around the world.
Online Faxing
Online faxing is the next step in fax technology, taking the functionality of legacy machines and adding modern innovations.
No Fax Functionality
You can remove fax as a practice altogether and look for an alternative.
Don’t Ditch Fax: Why You Want to Keep Your Business Fax Options Open
Ditching fax is not something we could ever recommend to anyone but the smallest of businesses that don’t engage in any sort of communication with other businesses or partners. Why is that? Because despite being old technology, fax remains an important part of the corporate landscape across the globe.
In many international economies, it continues to be a juggernaut of connectivity, and while it might be losing popularity in the UK, faxing has nevertheless retained a place in many industries, with no signs of the platform budging anytime soon. The result is that you’ll find over a billion fax documents are sent every year. If you don’t have fax functionality, you can’t fax with the millions of other companies that maintain fax systems. When considered alongside other benefits, such as easy submission of visual documents and improved legality of files, there are clear advantages to including fax in your communication systems.
Other options, like email and snail mail, just don’t provide the functionality and versatility your business needs.
The Legacy Fax Machine: 6 Reasons to Avoid It
Since it’s important to maintain fax communication for your business, you may consider buying a fax machine — or continuing to use one if you already own the hardware. But this isn’t going to support optimal business progression and success. There are numerous reasons legacy fax machines need to be left behind, and here, we outline six of the most important:
- Fax Machines Are Slow — You can only send one file at a time using a fax machine. That one file can only be managed one page at a time. If you have many pages to send as part of one transmission, it can take you a long time. During that time, nobody else can send or receive a fax, either, slowing the entire workplace down.
- Fax Machines Are Immobile — You cannot move a fax machine, which means they simply don’t support remote work practices. As many workers move towards flexible working attitudes, a fixed piece of hardware like a fax machine is not going to offer optimised task completion.
- Fax Machines Are Not Secure — In the modern era of GDPR, data protection is vital to all businesses in Britain. Fax machines just are not capable of offering the security you need. From major software flaws to a high potential for human error and unauthorised document access, fax machines present a real danger to your data compliance processes.
- Fax Machines Are Unreliable — Fax machines often use old analogue-based systems to operate, which makes them far less reliable than modern alternatives. The result is downtime for your business communication when the connection is lost or unstable, and even the potential for documents to go missing in transit. That’s not even mentioning the problems with printing, paper jams and hardware issues that fax machines have become notorious for.
- Fax Machines Are Costly — Paper, ink, toner and maintenance; all these regular costs add up. Add to this the cost of the hardware itself, and the hours of work lost to the inefficiencies and reliability issues with fax machines, and you can start to understand the real cost of these machines.
- Fax Machines Are Obsolete — BT has announced that 2025 will see the removal of ISDN and PSDN from its services. Since fax machines often rely on these services, the ISDN switch-off means that fax machine hardware in the UK will soon become almost completely obsolete. While other methods of data transmission will be available, the primary and most optimised communication channel will be completely removed.
Online Fax: The Future of Fax Communication for Your Business
As fax machines don’t offer your business with a modern solution worthy of investment, yet a lack of fax functionality is going to leave you without necessary communication channels, you are left with one option: online faxing.
Far from being the best of a bad bunch, though, online fax solutions are highly beneficial for your business, providing a wealth of important advantages that can help your company develop and grow. Online fax does exactly that; it takes faxing online. You can send and receive fax documents as you would with a fax machine, but everything is done through a digital process. There are no physical files; instead, all fax documents are handled digitally.
What this means for your business is that you can achieve the vital fax connectivity required in the current working world. But you can also remove the fax machine completely and enjoy all the benefits of a digital service. These include:
- Data encryption that supports GDPR and other data laws
- Better security measures, such as access controls and document management systems
- Access via smartphones for flexible and remote working
- Reduced costs through the removal of expensive physical assets
- A lack of reliance on outdated technology, ensuring continued relevance in the modern working environment
- Enhanced reliability through cloud-based technology and online technical support
- Increased business productivity through multi-access services and quick file uploads.
When it comes to business fax options, there is little doubt that online fax services are the ultimate choice for your company. Offering all the functionality of the legacy fax machine while removing the negative qualities and even enhancing the process, these innovative cloud-based systems are the future of fax.