Solve a Major Pain Point for Your IT Clients: the Fax Dilemma

By eFax Corporate Guest Blog

You know how frustrating it can be when your aging computer (or tablet or smartphone) becomes increasingly fussy about working with new apps or operating systems? Eventually you face a dilemma: Upgrade to the new hardware, or just accept that your device’s usefulness will keep degrading and you’ll have increasing trouble using it.

With that in mind, here’s some good news and bad news.

First, the bad news: Fax is still a critical part of many organizations’ business-critical processes. Because of fax’s security, convenience and compliance with the data-privacy regulations we’ve talked about in other posts, we actually see fax usage increasing. According to the fax experts at David Consulting, we are right in the middle of a doubling in size of the online fax market—which they expect to increase from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2018.

So, fax is a given. Many of your IT customers experience this problem on a companywide scale–trying to keep their aging corporate fax infrastructure integrated with the flurry of new cloud services, mobile apps and devices their organizations are deploying. This isn’t an easy task, considering fax technology was invented in the nineteenth century, and analog fax machines haven’t changed much since the 1980s.

Oh, sure, an IT department can upgrade from desktop fax machines to fax servers–but that only centralizes the problems inherent in analog faxing, and often creates new ones for the IT managers themselves. For example, faxes received on fax servers lack chain of custody, and can therefore expose businesses to security and regulatory risks. Analog faxes also aren’t automatically archived, which leads to problems with tracking down old documents (often for IT to solve). Also, because of fax servers’ limited storage, IT managers are often forced to purge the drives and print out the cache of stored faxes.

And if all that weren’t enough, fax servers are notorious for crashing during peak fax volume, meaning that IT managers have to reboot them, while dealing with employee questions and complaints.

Now the good news: You can offer your IT customers a solution to their ongoing pain from having to manage their organization’s antiquated fax infrastructure–whether that infrastructure consists of desktop fax machines or in-house fax servers, or both.

How? By helping your customers move their fax processes entirely to the cloud.

Two Great Pieces of Educational Content for You

eFax Corporate recently published a well-received white paper called “IT Manager’s Survival Guide: Outsource Your Fax Infrastructure to the Cloud (and Look Like an IT Hero).” Next we hosted an “IT Manager’s Survival Guide” webinar, which was also very well received.

In both of these educational materials, we attempted to address a question many IT organizations face today (or may be soon): “What do we do about aging fax servers and other fax infrastructure nearing end-of-life?”

As an MSP, you can leverage the research and insights in the IT Survival Guide white paper and webinar to present your IT customers with a winning alternative to their clunky, time-consuming fax infrastructure.

And as an eFax Corporate Partner, you can offer them a painless migration the most trusted, scalable and reliable cloud faxing solution available.

How You Can Offer Your Customers the Most Trusted Online Fax Solution

If you’re interested in adding the industry-leading online fax service to your portfolio, please visit our eFax Corporate Partner page.

eFax Corporate, often complemented by eFax Secure in highly regulated business environments, is a compliant faxing service that millions of businesses trust every day to transmit their most sensitive documents. Our proven process helps enterprises meet the strictest federal mandates regarding data transfer, tracking and storage.

Currently responsible for the Enterprise Partner Program for j2 Cloud Services, Peter Ely is a 27-year technology veteran, having held senior executive positions looking after presales support, product management,  product marketing and technical evangelist teams in the telecommunications and data networking arenas in positions located across two continents and three countries. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.