Cloud fax helps regulated businesses to communicate securely using flexible cloud services or a mix of cloud and on-premises systems.
Many organizations have invested heavily in their existing fax infrastructure, and now wish to modernize without sacrificing security, uptime, or critical integrations. A cloud fax solution allows for streamlining and scaling fax processes while keeping familiar workflows and meeting security and regulatory needs.
In general, the move to cloud or hybrid faxing provides cost and compliance benefits over legacy fax servers. On-prem hardware brings high costs, high maintenance, and little flexibility, requiring costly hardware and telephony upgrades at each new threshold of fax volume. Cloud fax cuts overhead and relieves bottlenecks while greatly reducing the administrative workload.
Hybrid cloud fax is compelling for high-volume but highly regulated use cases. Hybrid architecture not only allows for gradual modernization, but provides absolute control over data residency to satisfy privacy policies, data processing agreements, and so forth. Without physical telephony constraints, scaling up (or down) is as easy as a software license update.
Hybrid and pure cloud fax services both support HIPAA compliance. At minimum, any enterprise-grade vendor will:
Our hybrid fax architecture supports business continuity through disaster recovery and high availability. Modern cloud fax solutions provide stable, secure faxing and immediate recovery during outages. These systems work as main fax platforms, providing backups if servers go down or demand surges. Built-in high availability keeps faxes moving even during failures, while disaster recovery keeps business connected if a disaster disrupts local resources.
In practice, this entails:
We remove single points of failure from fax transmission, storage, and user access. When HA is properly configured, users may not even realize an interruption has occurred.
This also streamlines scaling up or down. Additional fax channels, if needed, can be provisioned quickly and without on-prem resources.
Scalability is a main selling point of typical cloud fax solutions. And it's absolutely true that these services can handle capacity spikes without interruption or advanced planning.
The catch is that purely cloud-based fax services typically charge per page or per fax. Scaling is smooth indeed, but the costs of scaling can be hard to predict. Some providers also charge based on per-minute thresholds, meaning normal fluctuations in transmission speed could double or halve the cost of the same document.
Compared to pure cloud services, hybrid cloud fax may cost half as much for organizations that see consistently high volumes of faxing.
As a rule of thumb, hybrid solutions support more complex workflow and routing requirements.
Pure cloud fax services have fewer native integrations than hybrid cloud/server solutions. And since custom integrations are typically limited to REST APIs, it's not always possible to integrate directly with older desktop or server applications.
Likewise, fax SaaS vendors have more limited built-in tools on average. For instance, it may be trivially easy to receive faxes as PDF email attachment, but signing or routing that PDF usually requires manual intervention and/or third-party tools. But with a hybrid cloud solution, the vendor's tools and modules can typically automate the entire workflow—from receipt to processing to approval to document archival.
Finally, certain organizations are legally obligated to maintain data residency or full data sovereignty. Cloud services may offer some degree of control over data residency (often in higher pricing tiers), but with multitenant architecture, they generally cannot grant clients absolute control over storage.
In spite of their limitations, cloud fax solutions are simple to buy, use, and support. And when IT faces ever-growing project backlogs and perpetual time crunches, simplicity goes a long way.
But those benefits don't erase the limitations around cloud fax features, pricing, and governance.
Our Private Fax Cloud® is a fully managed hybrid solution for regulated enterprises. We pre-configure best practices and manage its minimal infrastructure, so you'll experience a rapid and largely hands-off deployment—just like you'd expect from a SaaS application.
Yet it's powered by RightFax under the hood, meaning dozens of native integrations and powerful workflow tools are available off the shelf, and there are virtually no constraints on custom integrations and features. This architecture saves customers up to 50% per page versus pure cloud solutions while maintaining absolute control over their data.
It often strikes the right balance for orgs that are burdened by on-prem fax servers, but equally concerned about cloud-fax costs or constraints.
Please reach out today to learn more or discuss your needs in detail.
