You're still using a fax machine? Retire those dinosaurs and move to the cloud

There is always a difficult tipping point when it comes to technology, when you have to forget about the large investment you made several years ago in a hardware device or software application and face the harsh reality that it has outlived its usefulness. I know it was difficult for me to put to rest my dual floppy Tandy PC, a stand-alone 20 MB external hard drive, a reliable old daisy wheel impact printer and my original Blackberry email device (I really miss that last one.)

But progress is inevitable. Many businesses put their dedicated, thermo graphic fax machines out to pasture years ago (remember the curled paper scrolls?) replacing them with newer technology—plain paper fax machines—only to see them exchanged for multi-function peripherals a few years later. Some users equated the fax medium with the devices themselves, thinking faxing would be made obsolete by email. Yet as IT administrators at any size organization can attest, faxing hasn’t gone away—not by a long shot.  To improve fax management, companies networked their fax processing, investing in fax servers and dedicated fax boards to rasterize documents prior to sending over telephony networks (PSTN.) Eventually servers were developed to support the digitizing of documents for IP transmissions. Technology marches on and another investment is sent to the scrap heap.