While many think fax has become an obsolete technology and assume fax server usage has fallen dramatically over the last few years, the technology remains an essential part of some business environments. Analyst firm Gartner, for example, has reported in its Market Guide for Fax Solutions that evaluation and implementation of fax servers has increased by 5% per year and the technology still plays an important role in supporting critical business communications processes.
The main markets that require fax servers include sectors such as healthcare, legal and finance. Healthcare companies, for example, utilise fax technologies to enable cost savings and secure communication management because faxes can integrate simply with electronic medical and health records. In the legal industry, fax continues to be a main communications method for lawyers, courts and clients because it provides a trail and timestamp. The finance sector, meanwhile, relies on fax because it meets high-security regulatory requirements.
Ongoing usage of fax is not confined to these areas. In manufacturing, companies have made the technology integral to business processes such as purchase ordering and use it to provide a high-quality automated service for transactions. Fax is also widely adopted by governments, again because of the high level of secure communication the technology offers.
Fax technology itself has not stood still. The pandemic has resulted in accelerated cloud adoption and this has seen a larger move away from paper-based faxing to reliable fax delivery over the internet across any device. The documents are securely stored in a centralised repository that can be integrated with the company directory or LDAP.
This has seen a growing number of requests for cloud fax servers as part of an all-in-one communication platform that offers the flexibility of fax in addition UC offerings. The integration of fax alongside email, text, SMS and CRM has reinvigorated the future of fax servers with new features and benefits being added to fax’s capabilities.
