As businesses and processes go increasingly digital, employees are no longer tied to their office desks, and fax machines and fixed phone lines are being consigned to the past. However, digital fax ensures that faxing remains a critical communication tool for many organizations, especially those operating in highly regulated industries like healthcare, legal and manufacturing.
Digital Fax 101
Digital faxing enables companies to continue sharing sensitive data and critical documents without relying on paper and traditional fax machines. But what is a digital fax? Also known as e-faxing or online faxing, the process involves a digital fax number and the use of mobile phones, laptops or PCs as digital fax machines.
Digital fax servers allow users to send and receive electronic faxes on any device, often within email and desktop applications and integrated enterprise platforms and workflows. The process ensures that sensitive and confidential information is shared securely, improving compliance and removing the risk of paper faxes being lost or misplaced.
Organizations can manage fax communications centrally, using an online faxing solution like eFax to securely file sent and received messages. This is particularly crucial as organizations digitize their processes. Paper-based messages must be shared with multiple departments or manually entered into a company’s systems for auditing purposes. Taking this digital ensures faxes can be directly integrated into enterprise applications, such as accounting and content management systems, and then seamlessly stored for secure filing.
The Rise of Digital Faxing Technology
The ease of use and practicality of digital faxing has seen its popularity surge, driving an 11.03% increase in revenue for the fax services market between 2022 and 2027, according to ReportLinker research. The technology is on the rise as it enables users to send digital fax messages on the go, enhancing productivity while maintaining security and compliance.
This capability is critical for companies operating in highly regulated industries. For example, integrating digital faxing with enterprise applications like document management systems enables healthcare providers to optimize patient information exchange, ensure compliance with data privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and increase productivity.
6 Benefits of Digital Faxing
Moving from traditional physical fax machines to digital faxing offers multiple benefits, including:
Digital Faxing On The Go
One of the most significant drawbacks of relying on traditional fax machines is the requirement for employees to be physically present at their office to send and receive faxes. Transforming a device like a mobile phone into a digital fax machine removes this requirement, enabling employees to send faxes anytime, anywhere.
Enhanced Fax Security
Using traditional processes, fax messages are printed on the recipient’s fax machine, and anyone in the office can access the sensitive data. Taking faxing digital ensures that received messages are confined to users’ mobile phones and computers, alleviating concerns of confidential documents being picked up by mistake or unauthorized individuals.
Remote Working Capabilities
The new age of digital and hybrid working means it’s increasingly important for employees to work productively at any time and from anywhere. Digital faxing allows users to work remotely, sending and receiving fax messages on their mobile device or laptop whenever and wherever they need to, be it working from home, a cafe, a hotel or an airport.
Greater Collaboration
Organizations operating in highly regulated industries often rely on collaboration between cross-functional departments and teams. Sharing information across these teams using traditional fax processes is time-consuming, prone to error and expensive. However, digital fax solutions enable users to share virtual links to documents and quickly share updates, design changes, and progress reports. This significantly streamlines project management, makes users more productive and simplifies decision-making across the organization, enabling companies to meet project timelines and achieve objectives with greater efficiency.
Improved Organization
Managing all fax messages sent and received by employees can be a cumbersome, almost impossible task using traditional fax processes. Digital faxing transforms the organization of fax communication, automatically filing users’ sent and received messages and enabling quick and simple search capabilities.
Cost Reduction
Traditional fax machines can be costly to purchase and manage, with additional costs to carry out maintenance, keep them topped up with paper, ink and toner, and purchase fixed phone lines. Digital faxing removes these costs as there’s no need for phone lines, fax machine supplies or service updates.
How Digital Faxing Technology Works?
Modern digital faxing makes the challenge of how to send a digital fax far more simple than using a traditional fax machine. A digital fax machine, such as a smartphone or laptop, uses the internet to transmit data and send a fax message to a digital fax number, rather than using fixed phone lines.
Digital Fax vs. Traditional Fax: A Detailed Breakdown
There are significant differences between digital faxing and traditional fax, including:
| Traditional Fax | Digital Faxing | |
| Application Integration | Doesn’t provide integration capabilities and data must be entered manually. | Provides full integration with popular enterprise applications, collaboration tools and email systems |
| Business Usage | Tends to be slow to use and difficult to scale across a business. | Can be adapted to meet businesses’ evolving communication requirements and is scalable to encourage business growth. |
| Costs | Can be costly to purchase, maintain and top up supplies, and require skilled technical resources. | Removes the costs of purchasing and maintaining machines, ensuring a lower TCO and IT resources. |
| Downtime Issues | A fax machine problem prevents all employees from sending fax communications. Machines are prone to problems that can be difficult to monitor and identify faults. | Provides reliable, stable communications and will resend messages automatically if the service is disrupted. |
| Productivity | Physical fax machines are inefficient, error-prone, insecure and time consuming | Faxes are delivered directly to users on their own devices, ensuring fast and efficient communication, accurate information and secure data storage. |
| Operations | Requires regular upgrades, access to physical phone lines and can be complex to consolidate with other business operations. | Offers simple upgrades and centralized control, management and storage. |
| IT Environment | Often requires complex onsite infrastructure and relies on expensive hardware and licenses. | Uses the Internet or a centralized infrastructure for simple accessibility. |
eFax: A Reliable Digital Fax Solution for Businesses
Digital faxing solution eFax makes it easy for businesses and users to secure fax numbers and send and receive messages at any time, from anywhere and on any device. The benefits of eFax include:
Secure Faxing: eFax ensures all sent and received messages are kept safe and secure at all times. The solution encrypts data and fax messages on user devices and while in transit using AES 256-bit and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption.
Regulatory Compliance: eFax helps companies to maintain robust auditing and reporting. The solution helps them bring their faxing processes in line with data privacy and compliance requirements like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the Health Insurance Portability, HIPAA and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Cost Saving: eFax helps companies to keep costs down by removing the need to buy and maintain fax machines and purchase office supplies and phone lines.
Storage Options: eFax makes faxing accessible and convenient through unlimited cloud storage. All messages sent and received by users are stored in the secure eFax cloud environment, which is accessible at any time on any device. This removes concerns about critical documents being lost or deleted.
Tech Integration: eFax is compatible with popular business applications and workflows, making it easy to integrate with existing infrastructure. Employees can maximize productivity by using the service through email and social media services, collaboration tools and cloud storage solutions.
FAQs Around Digital Fax
You can send a digital fax using your mobile phone or computer. Log in to your online faxing solution, compose a fax message, attach the required documents and hit send, in the same way you’d send an email.
Digital faxing works by electronically sending fax messages and documents over the Internet. Faxes are delivered directly to a fax number and can be sent and received on any internet-connected device.
Digital faxing is highly secure as online faxing solutions like eFax use leading encryption technologies to protect sensitive data.
No, you don’t need a fax machine to send digital fax messages. Digital faxing is possible on any device with an internet connection, including mobile phones, laptops and PCs.
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