Fax Architecture FAQ: Private Fax Cloud® vs. On-Prem vs. Public Cloud

Private Fax Cloud® increases reliability, reduces telecom costs, and practically eliminates administration for fax-intensive organizations. It's rooted in two-plus decades of enterprise RightFax implementations, wrapped up in a tidy and fully managed package.

It uses elements of both on-premises and public cloud faxing, but its overall architecture is fundamentally different from either.

What exactly does Private Fax Cloud bring to the table? How does it compare to conventional fax architecture?

Private Fax Cloud FAQ

Can we monitor fax statuses?

Private Fax Cloud provides near-real-time updates on outbound and inbound statuses. It also updates the history in real time. If a retry is necessary, then users are alerted and can monitor it immediately.

Users can receive status notifications on their own faxes as well as their team's/department's. Users also have the option to see and manage faxes by status. That's particularly helpful in high-volume use cases, where multiple documents are in flight at any time.

Public-cloud fax services, on the other hand, generally provide notifications long after the fact. Those often takes hours for large documents that deal with retries and busy signals.

How does it impact retry attempts?

Every retry or partial page incurs charges, costs staff time, and unnecessarily delays patient or customer care. Private Fax Cloud customers see fewer retry attempts. That's especially true for outbound documents, but often inbound ones, too.

Behind the scenes, the RightFax application optimizes batch size, sending time, routing, and many other parameters that maximize transmission success rates.

How does telecom billing work?

Each fax is billed in 6-second increments, starting after a flat rate for the first 30 seconds of transmission. This is similar to how phone companies bill. It's also a stark contrast to the billing models of most public cloud fax services, which often charge per page and add significant fees after 60 seconds.

What payback period or ROI should we expect?

The payback period and overall ROI depend on your current fax architecture, volume of faxes, and workflow steps/integration. The consulting and planning phase will include a detailed exercise to model this for your org. But, generally speaking, here are typical time frames:

• Coming from paper faxing: under 6 months
• Coming from on-premises RightFax: under 3 months
• Coming from public cloud fax services: 1 year

Very conservatively, you can expect net cost savings starting early in year 2. Long-term ROI is typically in the $100,000s to $1,000,000s, or 10x-100x the implementation cost.

What are our virtualization options?

A virtualized RightFax instance and IP telephony are the keys to hands-off management. In fact, they're the default architecture in most cases, now that copper lines are no longer generally available.

Virtualization is provider-agnostic. Major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP are the most common choices. That said, any vendor that meets your security and service level requirements is viable.

Self-hosting is also popular among customers with spare VMware or Hyper-V resources. In any case, there is no hardware whatsoever for the RightFax application or telephony.

How do we access the UI?

You'll access the Private Fax Cloud solution online. It supports any modern browser for any device—desktop and mobile alike. Users can send, receive, manage, annotate, combine, and/or split faxes over the web. Likewise, administrators can manage users, access audit trails, and even manage routing and service-level rules from their browser.

What permissions and access levels are available?

There are built-in (and customizable) permissions templates for basic users, power users, supervisors, help desk, and administrators. Of course, those are just starting points. Most Private Fax Cloud customers will modify them (or create entirely new templates) to suit their security and compliance standards.

We'll guide you through permissions planning, implementation, and testing. Then, if desired, we'll equip your admins to do the same.

What sort of security is built in?

Most public cloud fax use email with PDF attachments to send and receive faxes. Unfortunately, that generally falls short of HIPAA standards. Private Fax Cloud has the same inherent security and point-to-point transmission as any analog fax device. After all, that's the main reason fax is still widely used in industries like healthcare. After transmission, it's also important to store historical fax images securely. To that end, it creates a centralized archive with role-based user permissions and full access logging. This, of course, can be fully encrypted.

How does it integrate with other applications?

Fax never exists in a vacuum, so OpenText offers a large and ever-growing set of native RightFax integrations. With off-the-shelf modules, or just a few hours of development, Private Fax Cloud integrates with nearly all common MFPs/MFDs, EHRs/EMRs, ERPs, CRMs, email providers, and most other line-of-business applications.

In the rare event that a key application isn't already support, we use the RightFax SDK or one of its APIs to extend secure cloud faxing to virtually any software or device on the market.

Would it let us automate document workflows?

There are built-in tools to automate common tasks like signatures, routing, or archival.It also includes native OCR capabilities to extract fax data and metadata. This can be indexed and saved alongside faxes, or even exported as tidy XML that other applications can ingest.

How many vendors would we need to work with to support this?

We—Paperless Productivity®—are the only vendor and point of contact that you'll interact with on a regular basis. We support the digital fax solution and telephony end to end. And in the unlikely case of a software vendor escalation, we'll manage it every step of the way.

We're now into our third decade of designing, implementing, and support enterprise fax solutions. That amounts to far over a century of combined experience! As a Private Fax Cloud customer, you'll have access to this expertise through one of the most experienced and capable support teams around.

Fax Architecture Comparison