The fax machine is very much a staple of the modern business landscape, despite the fact it’s very old technology. It’s time for it to go — but what alternatives are available to take its place?
Article overview:
Do You Really Need a Fax Alternative?
Fax remains an important part of communication for businesses the world over. The loss of fax functionality would be detrimental. However, maintaining traditional fax machines poses several risks to your business. You need a fax machine alternative that still enables fax.
What Fax Alternative Should Your Business Use?
Common replacements for fax include email and post. The problem is, post is not optimised for modern businesses and email doesn’t offer the functionality of faxing. Instead, digital fax is the best fax machine alternative available. It enables continued fax functionality without the pitfalls of other options
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Do You Need a Fax Machine Alternative?
The first question to ask is, does your fax machine even need replacing? Seeking out fax machine alternatives seems unnecessary if you can carry on using your current hardware.
Fax machines are legacy technology designed in the 19th century and popularised after the Second World War. They are outdated pieces of business hardware that have stood the test of time because of their functionality and convenience. However, their age is starting to show.
Fax machines are not suited to the modern era. They are proven risks to data security and computer network safety. They are also vastly inferior when it comes to workplace efficiency and costs, as compared to digital technology. Keeping them in your business is all-but-guaranteed to have a negative impact, and also means you are not optimising processes for the demands of 21-st century work.
Maintaining fax machines is a lot like keeping pagers. They certainly perform a function, but their limitations become more and more apparent as the years go by.
The Problem with Obvious Alternatives
The fax machine has to go, but where do you turn for fax machine alternatives?
When looking to send physical documents, the first consideration might be postal mail, but then this is what the fax machine was initially brought in to avoid. Slow and expensive, postal mail also has risks similar to fax machines and has high paper demands in an era when most businesses are looking to go paperless.
The next obvious option is email. Again, there are major problems here. Email servers are notoriously easy to hack and manipulate, identified as the top security vulnerability for businesses in a recent poll, while email messages are also not considered authentic in legal matters, which is one of the reasons businesses still fax.
When looking at the obvious choices, it is impossible to find a fax machine alternative that makes sense. Part of this is down to the fact that getting rid of fax isn’t a good idea for your business.
Why You Shouldn’t Ditch the Fax
Fax is still a vital part of the modern business landscape; that is why you still have a fax machine after all. Some industries are reliant on it as a communication method, as are some international economies. Billions of faxes are sent every year, and millions of new machines are purchased by businesses to meet their fax demands.
As a practice, fax can play a significant role in your business’s success. Without the ability to fax, you may end up cutting important lines of communication and even alienating your business from certain industries. For example, fax is still important in healthcare and law. It is also massive in economies like the USA and Japan. Any business that wishes to deal with these industries or economies needs fax technology, or they will suffer.
Fax is synonymous with the fax machine, but in reality, the two are not mutually exclusive. Fax is a method of communication, while fax machines are used to send faxes. What you want to do is split the two, so you can remove the fax machine but still send and receive fax.
The Best Fax Machine Alternative
Digital fax is not only the best fax machine alternative but is realistically the only fax machine alternative.
It allows businesses to remove fax machines from their workplace while continuing to send and receive fax documents. It even connects with traditional fax machines, converting files automatically so you can send and receive fax to and from a business still using fax machines. Many of the risk factors involved in physical fax are also eliminated, while security is improved and efficiency boosted.
Digital fax is the only technology available that enables upgraded communication to fit modern business demands while simultaneously allowing for the continuation of essential fax transmissions.