You’d be forgiven for thinking you wouldn’t have to even consider buying a fax machine in the 21st century – after all, you wouldn’t be buying a LaserDisc player either. However, fax isn’t going away, and for many businesses fax is still essential. Does this mean you need to free up space to install a bulky, noisy fax machine? Probably not: all you need is an internet connection.
There are a few reasons why faxing is still relevant to businesses, one of the most important being that faxes can be legally binding. Faxes allow you to sign and stamp legal documents, so regulated industries recognize faxes but not emails, making the veteran technology essential for them. With fax you can also receive confirmation reports to verify that your document was received.
Although fax machines are a thing of the past for the majority of the population, many businesses still rely on them. There are plenty of reasons for this, and the reasons can vary from industry to industry. For example, hospitals are full of state-of-the-art medical equipment responsible for saving people’s lives every day, but it may surprise you to know that hospitals are also full of old-fashioned fax machines. Amusingly, today’s medical students can be more confused by how to operate a fax machine than how to perform an actual operation. But it’s the security fax provides that keeps it still widely used in hospitals. For example, emailing a patient’s medical records would be careless because of how insecure email is, so these records are either sent by mail or faxed. According to one study, about 75% of all medical communication is done by fax, so it clearly remains a vital part of the healthcare industry.
The financial sector also has a strong need for faxing. Like medical services, the finance sector has a lot of confidential documents that must be exchanged securely. Mortgage papers, purchase orders, bank statements, loan applications – all of these must be sent as safely as possible. Insurance companies also rely on fax often to handle this kind of information. Since the only way you can intercept a fax is to be physically next to the receiving fax machine (or use governmental powers to wiretap telephone lines), faxing is one of the safest methods of communication.
Legal firms naturally have to deal with confidential information on a daily basis and faxes are still an important way of transferring sensitive details securely. Courthouses all have machines for this purpose too, as fax is a secure way to share case information. Fax is also crucial for government communication. If you want to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act, then you’ll have to send a fax for it to be accepted.
Although your business does need fax capability, it doesn’t need a fax machine. Online fax services know very well the types of businesses using their services and cater to their special requirements. Many fax services are compliant with regulations like HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. As with machine faxing, online faxing can also provide confirmation reports, so there’s nothing machine faxing can do that digital faxing can’t – besides make an annoying sound. Indeed, with online faxing you’ll only ever need to use paper when you need to print a fax, reducing your paper and toner costs. You won’t ever have to buy new machines or pay for repairs either. Your business can therefore save a significant amount of money by going from machine faxing to online faxing.
Switching over to an online fax service is less of a hassle than you might imagine. There’s no new equipment to install, and your service will be ready to use immediately. On top of that, you can get rid of your bulky old machine. You don’t have to worry about a phone line, and you’ll be able to send faxes from anywhere in the world.
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