Future-Proof Your Fax Environment

The Death of POTS?

If you’re business relies on faxing for any part of operations, you have no doubt heard about the impending problems with traditional phone lines. Prior to August 2, 2022, incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) were obliged to offer their POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) products to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) at discounted rates. This arrangement enabled CLECs to sell POTS products in the market at competitive prices without the need to construct their own infrastructure. However, the FCC has since eliminated this requirement.

Telecommunications companies are beginning to make big changes to the way they maintain and sell POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) due to the elimination of this requirement and other factors involving the cost to maintain aging copper wire infrastructure. AT&T already announced the decommissioning of 50% of their legacy copper infrastructure by 2025 operations. Other ILECs, like Verizon and Windstream, are sun-setting services and increasing rates as incentives to move away from POTS.

What is Digital Cloud Faxing?

Traditional fax servers require on-site installation and hardware/software connected to a telephone service. Generally, this took the shape of analog or digital T1/PRI hardware like fax boards or appliances and possibly even fax over IP software. With this setup, a connection is made through your on-site telephone system for DID (Direct Inward Dial) fax routing.

Digital cloud fax is a modern and efficient way to send and receive faxes using the power of the cloud. With cloud fax, you can securely transmit faxes over the internet, access them from anywhere, and integrate faxing into your existing business workflows seamlessly. It’s a hassle-free and reliable solution that streamlines your faxing process and boosts productivity.

The Risks of Analog Faxing

A fax number is all that’s need for a cyber-criminal to breach a company’s infrastructure. Malware or Ransomware can easily be inserted onto an image file, which, when decoded by the fax machine, could breach data or spread to all connected networks.

Analog faxes may not be compliant by default. Fax machines and servers are often not equipped with encryption software. Sensitive data may remain on unsecured hard drives.

Access to sensitive documents is up in the air unless you are waiting by the machine. When companies share fax machines among employees it can violate regulations like GDPR, MIFID II, HIPAA and FERPA.

The Problem with Analog Faxing

FCC order 19-72A1 officially went into effect on August 2022. Telephone companies are decommissioning the copper telephone lines that have been relied upon for over 100 years. They are no longer obligated to offer analog telephone services, and prices are being deregulated. We have already seen many of our clients incur additional “maintenance” and “upkeep” fees for these analog lines.

In the short term, this could mean higher prices for traditional telephone services as phone companies try to get customers to switch to other options. In the long term, these lines will be decommissioned or very expensive to maintain. Gone are the days of contacting your phone company to repair lines. You may soon need to call a contractor to fix them! (Many carriers are beginning to offer digital fax solutions, but they operate through third parties and most fail to meet compliance standards.) 

All of this comes together to one point. Traditional faxing is going to get more expensive and harder to sustain. As a result, organizations, particularly those subject to heavy regulation, are actively adopting digital cloud faxing as a solution to address the increasing costs and inevitable obsolescence of their existing analog faxing environment.

Is Digital Faxing Right for You?

Digital Faxing will save time and money by eliminating the time-consuming manual steps of traditional faxing—and replacing them with a streamlined digital platform that is accessible from any device with an internet connection and can be integrated into any modern workflow automation.

When considering your needs regarding faxing, here are some questions you might ask:

  • Do you have 24/7 access to send and receive faxes regardless of location?
  • Are unauthorized people able to send, receive, view, and copy faxes?
  • Can you reproduce sent/received fax pages on demand?
  • Can you easily report all incoming and outbound fax transactions?
  • Can you produce an audit log if requested?
  • Are your inbound faxes received on shared devices instead of going directly to the intended recipient? Does this meet compliance?
  • Do all faxes include your cover page with contact info or a confidentiality statement?
  • Can you send/receive faxes when your fax telephone service or fax devices fail or the line is busy?

With a digital cloud solution, your faxes become easier to manage, more secure, and more adaptable, always compliant, and available on any mobile device.

Has your company been affected by the change to plain telephone lines? Are you looking to the future and want a secure, seamless way to manage your faxing needs? The Solutions Specialists at Waltz Business Solutions can help! Let us show you the simplicity and power of a digital fax solution.

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How Digital Cloud Fax Solutions Keep You Secure and Compliant

Traditional faxing has many pitfalls when it comes to compliance. Documents sitting in a device’s tray does not meet many compliance standards. Additionally, in offices with shared hardware, the possibility of data breaches, both intentional and accidental, often arises. Built for the healthcare industry, Digital Cloud Faxing allows an organization to meet compliance standards and stay secure with their fax environment.

Cloud faxed images/content being processed and faxed only persist for the life of the fax transmission and are destroyed with all data being zeroed. Fax images are FIPS-140 deleted and permanently removed. This ensures meeting all regulatory compliance requirements.

Each fax is administered using TLS 1.2 Encrypted Email which appears as an Adobe PDF fax page attachment. For companies in need of an audit trail, AES-256 encrypted PDF fax storage is capable of securely storing files both sent and received for up to nine years if necessary. (Based on a business’ needs, retention schedules can be set for any time frame to purge unneeded documents and stay compliant.)

Don’t Let The Decommissioning of POTS Slow You Down

Contact Us today to embrace the power of Digital Cloud Fax and experience the advantages of efficient, secure, and cost-effective document transmission.

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What About Fax Over VOIP?

Phone using VOIP

Fax technology relies on traditional analog telephone lines, which offer a constant and dedicated connection through circuit-switching. Fax signals are transmitted as audio tones based on the analog characteristics of these phone lines.

However, the emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which transmits voice signals over the internet using digital packets, poses challenges for fax transmission. Packet switching in VoIP can lead to information loss during fax transmissions, resulting in distorted content upon arrival.

Jitter buffers, used to mitigate network latency in VoIP, can disrupt fax signal timing and cause errors, blank pages, or missing information. The T.38 protocol, which converts analog fax signals into digital packets for transmission over IP networks, is a potential fix. However, it’s not universally supported by all VoIP service providers and requires complex configuration and maintenance.

Benefits of Digital Cloud Fax Service

You can easily integrate a digital solution for your faxing environment, experiencing simplicity, seamlessness, and numerous advantages, including cost savings. While traditional phone lines increase in price, your company could save $40 or more per month for every analog POTS fax line eliminated. A base plan with all functionality costs about the same cost as one analog fax line. Coupled with the savings in increasing maintenance and fees being charged for old copper telephone lines, a digital solution will definitely look better for your bottom line.

In addition to cost, there is no need for MFP fax hardware or an MFP fax line. Fax servers are expensive and need continuous updates. Reduce the need for costly fax servers and the additional lines needed for them. A cloud fax solution will integrate seamlessly with the hardware you already have. Digital fax is affordable for small companies but also features, scalability, security, and advanced options for enterprise organizations.

Digital faxing also offers many useful features that are not available with traditional faxing. For example, digital fax services typically allow you to store your faxes in the cloud or on-prem for easy access and retrieval. This provides a complete audit log for up to 9 years. In addition, you will never have to deal with a busy inbound fax signal. When faxes come in to a busy line, the system switches the port, eliminating the need for multiple lines on a server. And you can keep your existing fax numbers.

And if that isn’t enough, with a cloud fax solution you no longer need to print digital documents and then scan/fax them. This wastes paper, time, and resources and increases the risk of unauthorized viewing. This helps boost productivity as well as an organization’s green initiatives.

Digital Cloud Fax @ Waltz Business Solutions

Join thousands of businesses who have already embraced the future of faxing with Digital Cloud Fax. As POTS becomes a thing of the past, it’s time to adapt and future-proof your faxing environment. Elevate your communication, simplify your workflow, and unlock a world of efficiency and security with our state-of-the-art platform.

Ready for a fax revolution? Contact a Solutions Specialist today for a free assessment and see what Waltz can do for you!

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