There is always a difficult tipping point when it comes totechnology, when you have to forget about the large investment youmade several years ago in a hardware device or software applicationand face the harsh reality that it has outlived its usefulness. Iknow it was difficult for me to put to rest my dual floppy TandyPC, a stand-alone 20 MB external hard drive, a reliable old daisywheel impact printer and my original Blackberry email device (Ireally miss that last one.)

But progress is inevitable. Many businesses put their dedicated,thermo graphic fax machines out to pasture years ago (remember thecurled paper scrolls?) replacing them with newer technology—plainpaper fax machines—only to see them exchanged for multi-functionperipherals a few years later. Some users equated the fax mediumwith the devices themselves, thinking faxing would be made obsoleteby email. Yet as IT administrators at any size organization canattest, faxing hasn't gone away—not by a long shot. Toimprove fax management, companies networked their fax processing,investing in fax servers and dedicated fax boards to rasterizedocuments prior to sending over telephony networks (PSTN.)Eventually servers were developed to support the digitizing ofdocuments for IP transmissions. Technology marches on and anotherinvestment is sent to the scrap heap.

If all of this device replacement sounds familiar to you, youhave probably reached the next tipping point: it's time to retireyour fax servers. Yes they cost a lot, and they were probably paidfor long ago. But set that investment aside and consider yourmonthly overhead for maintaining these dinosaurs: they requireenergy, maintenance, constant attention, and if they go out ofcommission for any length of time, you need an immediate backup toreplace them. That commitment of effort and resources costs money,not just the hard costs of electricity and annual maintenance andsupport fees charged by the vendor, but opportunity andproductivity losses that can be a hidden value drain.

Retiring your fax servers gets you out of the fax technologymanagement business and allows you to focus on your core networkadministration responsibilities. What technology replaces faxservers? Hosted fax services. No hardware, software, telephonelines or paper needed. And no upfront investment or ongoing supportand maintenance costs. Best of all, you only pay for the fax volumeyou actually use, so if you see fax volume decline over the nextfew years, you aren't married to a technology investment thatoverwhelms its present day value.

Hosted fax services supplant fax servers—both telephony and Faxover Internet Protocol (FoIP) servers—for organizations withvarying fax volumes, remote staff and mobile sales professionals.Employees are assigned their own fax number that is often linked totheir email address, allowing them to send or receive faxes asemail attachments anywhere that they have internet access. Hostedfax services can also be linked to desktop or enterpriseapplications, for example Microsoft Office or SAP. Unlike faxservers that require substantial start up and maintenance efforts,hosted services can be initiated in minutes, resulting in immediateproductivity gains.

In addition to these user benefits, hosted services can be setup to provide secure transmissions, usually via encrypted TransportLayer Security (TLS) or dedicated Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)between users and the cloud-based hosted servers.

Next page: 6 self-assessment questions to determineif it is time to move to a cloud-based faxsolution

As you investigate hosted fax services in the cloud, here aresix important self-assessment questions to determine if it is timeto move on to a cloud-based fax solution:

1. How many faxes does your organization send eachday? Fax volume often goes unmeasured by IT, because oncethe infrastructure is in place the actual document flow goesunnoticed until the fax traffic strains capacity of the server orthe associated telephony service. Fax servers require constantmonitoring of system capacity and throughput volume to ensure thesolution is right-sized for your organization. While scaling up(adding telephone-lines and/or servers) can be slow andtime-consuming, scaling back is usually not an option.
2. Is your fax volume constant or do you have peaks andvalleys? Owning the equipment and infrastructure forfaxing means that you need to purchase hardware and bandwidth thatcan accommodate your highest usage level. This isn't so much anissue if on a daily basis you have a small fluctuation in thenumber of faxes sent and received. More likely however, you mayhave peak usage periods where weekly or monthly reports, campaigns,invoices or statements are sent, or incoming reports are due. Inthis situation, you have faxing overhead that may be capable of amuch higher volume yet is severely underutilized when viewed as awhole.
3. Do you have a backup plan for server downtime?The adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” is familiar to ITdirectors. Even the most robust server infrastructuresrequire scheduled maintenance and unexpected service outages. ITprofessionals will build in contingencies for these serviceinterruptions, usually through redundant servers, backuptransmission lines and the like. Of course these contingenciesincur costs and require resources of their own. For fax servers, itis advisable to have a second back-up server and a rerouting optionfor telephony issues, because faxes are quite often time sensitivetransactions. If you don't have a backup plan with appropriateservice outage contingencies, business-critical documents may bedelayed or go undelivered.
4. Is your organization distributed? The goldenage of fax servers occurred in the 1990s as companies looked tocentralize core services for easier management control and costsavings. Since then most companies have seen a distributedmodel fit their business better. If you have remotesalespeople, work from home employees, multiple officelocations, then having fax services in one location may notbe the most efficient—or most reliable—system for you.
5. Is your telephony environment stable ordynamic? Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has changedtelecommunications in corporate America. With sound qualityequal or exceeding equivalent public switched telephone networks(PSTN), over 80% of companies have adopted VoIP for voicecommunications. Yet some of these same companies maintaintelephony service just to support fax machines and/or servers. Ifyou have already made the switch to VoIP—or are in the process ofdoing so—continuing to support an in-house fax server will meanmaintaining otherwise unnecessary telephony costs.
6. What is your cost for each page faxed? Howmuch does it cost your company for each page that you send orreceive? It's a simple question but most companies have no ideawhat that number is. The simple mathematics suggests taking all thecosts of faxing and divides it by the number of pages transmitted.We have already discussed how tracking page volume is oftenunknown; the costs can be even more convoluted: hardware andsoftware maintenance, electricity, telephone lines, employee timefor maintenance and management. If you do the analysis of all thesenumbers you might be surprised to find that your actual cost pertransmission is higher than you would suspect. With hostedfax services this number is much easier to obtain and control.

Do a self-analysis and answer these questions about your faxingenvironment. Knowing this information before you engage a faxserver vendor or hosted fax services provider is akin to doing yourresearch before shopping for a new car. Knowing your currentsituation will prepare you to take an analytical approach to thebest available solutions.