Keep the faith with fax

It’s easy to assume that faxing has no place in today’s digitised workplace. When email and instant messaging apps are so established and familiar, the idea of typing in a fax number, feeding a document into a machine, and then having to wait beside that machine to print out a response for you, sounds at best quaint, and at worst slow, inefficient and insecure.

But fax has evolved and continues to underpin vital operational processes across a range of sectors. The ongoing importance of timestamping plus the advent of cloud in particular means that whether it’s finance, exchanging the details for buying a house, or sending and receiving critical and confidential healthcare documents, fax still has a significant contribution to make in the day-to-day running of an organisation.

Ofcom and the future of fax

In November last year, UK communications watchdog Ofcom launched a consultation on the future of faxing in which it proposed changes to existing rules so that UK telecom operators would no longer be required to provide fax services under their universal service obligation (USO).

According to Ofcom, fax has become increasingly outdated. Furthermore, as telecom operators upgrade the networks used to deliver faxes, there is no guarantee that fax services would work in the same way.

But fax is very much with us

It might therefore come as a surprise that the fax is still very much with us. One in six NHS trusts in the UK was found still to be using fax machines in 2022, despite former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s call in December 2018 for a complete phase-out of their use by April 2022 in favour of secure email. While this is still a reduction from the 9,000 fax machines used across the NHS in 2018 (source: Royal College of Surgeons), that fax has hung in there and that staff continue to use it despite the availability of newer competing technologies is an indication of its value as a trusted tool for certain tasks.

In 2020, my company eFax polled 1,001 senior IT and business decision-makers in large enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and public sector organisations to gain a greater understanding of the cloud-based electronic faxing market and its dynamics.

We found that the number of fax users in organisations is far higher than you’d think. Over half of the sample – 54% – had between six and 50 users; a full fifth even claimed that there were 51 or more fax users in their organisation. Fax usage within businesses was also expected to increase in over 37% of sampled businesses.

When it comes to fax, 35% use cloud-based fax systems, while 31% use a combination of cloud and traditional faxing. Only 15% of the sample remained wedded to their traditional fax machine. Faxing is more suited to documentation such as contracts, tenancy agreements, company accounts, financial documents and patient records than email, and thus it’s understandable that 68% of the sample saw fax remaining for at least the next five years.

The fax will exist for years to come

Fax remains central to many businesses and their operations. It underpins many organisations by enabling the secure communication of legally binding documents. Business users attest that the biggest driver for their ongoing use of fax is its security (41%). This is followed by its cost efficiency (36%), compliance with GDPR (34%), and the increasing importance of cloud storage (23%).

Fax, and especially digital cloud fax, is a tried and tested technology. Cloud fax providers have developed an infrastructure that provides business users with a private, secure and legally compliant way to transmit confidential or business-critical data to clients, vendors, partners, and other third parties.

Faxing also remains secure against human error or social engineering attacks. It remains consistently off the radar of hackers, so cybercriminals are less likely to target documents that are faxed compared to those sent over email. These reasons are why fax will retain a role at the heart of many businesses.

Furthermore, making the move away from analogue solutions to cloud faxing can help businesses save money and embrace enhanced convenience and functionality. Organisations that adopt cloud-based service tools for their faxing needs allow the encryption of e-document transmission, security controls to allow or deny their transmission, and overall organisation-wide capabilities and access without risking documents being lost or stolen.

It’s for these reasons that faxing continues to be a reliable, secure, up-to-date communication method that is in use around the world.

Let’s keep the faith when it comes to fax.