Earn New Revenue Helping Your Customers Secure Their Faxes

By eFax Corporate Guest Blog

The recent hack of Sony Pictures’ sensitive and proprietary data provides yet another disturbing reminder of the probable vulnerability and lack of regulatory compliance of your customers’ … business faxes. Don’t see the connection? Chances are your customers don’t, either, and this oversight might be causing them to leave a vital segment of their sensitive corporate data unprotected and at risk of falling short of federal regulations such as HIPAA and GLBA.

Fortunately, you can offer a secure fax solution, managed entirely in the cloud, that helps greatly enhance the security of your clients’ faxes–while creating a steady new revenue stream for your business.

Two Reasons Your Customers’ Faxes Might Not Be Secure or Compliant

1.      Your customers are using paper-based faxes that lack a definitive “chain of custody”

No matter the size or industry of your customer, there is a strong statistical likelihood that their offices use standard fax machines. A survey by research firm Opinion Matters found that 72% of U.S. businesses still rely on paper-based faxing.

To understand the potential security risk, consider this troubling statistic from the same Opinion Matters study: Nearly half of U.S. office workers admit to reading a document sitting on a fax machine intended for someone else. Add to this the fact that, as security firm Spectorsoft has found, 23% of enterprises have suffered a data breach from employees, contractors or others on the inside.

And because paper faxes can be read or grabbed by anyone who happens to walk by the office fax machine, this method of communication is not compliant with such strict federal data-privacy regulations as HIPAA compliance, SOX and GLBA.

As a managed service provider, you can offer your fax-machine-using customers a cloud-based, highly secure and federally compliant fax solution that lets their employees access inbound emails from a PIN-protected secure Web interface. This enterprise fax solution lets employees send and receive faxes securely through the cloud–by email, through a password-protected Web interface or even on a secure mobile app.

2.      Your customers do not have a secure method of storing archived faxes

It’s worth noting that the Sony data stolen by hackers–upward of 100 terabytes according to estimates–was taken not as it was transmitted, but while it was at rest, stored with poor digital security on Sony’s servers.

If your customers scan paper faxes and create digital copies for record-keeping purposes, the important security question is: Are these faxes secure 24/7/365 while in storage?

One typical scenario is that an employee within an enterprise will send or receive a paper fax, then make an electronic copy–and email the file to colleagues (or even to himself or herself). Often those faxes end up on an unsecured email server. This is another area where fax security–and regulatory compliance–can break down.

Even if your customer uses an electronic fax service, you need to know whether the service protects the business’s faxes both in transit and at rest­–and whether that fax service has mechanisms in place to ensure the enterprise’s faxes remain within that continual cocoon of security 24/7. Most services do not address both transmission and archive security. And both are necessary not only for data protection but also for compliance.

You can offer your customers the world’s most secure cloud-based fax solution–which protects faxes through TLS-encryption for transmission, and then continues protecting your customers’ faxes by storing them in a secured email inbox using 256-bit encryption (the same encryption levels the U.S. military uses for its documents classified “Top Secret”).   

The Solution That Offers All of These Benefits

eFax Corporate, often complemented by eFax Secure in highly regulated business environments, is entrusted every day to transmit millions of pages of sensitive corporate documents by businesses in the most heavily regulated industries. Our proven process helps enterprises meet the strictest federal mandates regarding data transfer, tracking and storage.

Indeed, among the billion fax pages eFax Corporate transmits electronically every month, hundreds of millions are for many of the largest healthcare providers and financial service firms, as well as nearly 30% of top law firms–businesses whose data security is a must.

And this solution is now part of our support-driven, high-touch, lucrative Partner Program. Please visit our eFax Corporate Partner page to learn more.

Peter Ely is Leader, Enterprise Partner Programs, at eFax. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.