There’s a very memorable scene from Mike Judge’s film, Office Space. It depicts three grown men, armed with a baseball bat, beating the ink out of their office fax machine — a clear homage to mafia films — which represented just one of the many things they despised about their jobs.
The entire movie is worth watching, if you’ve never seen it, but this particular scene represents a trend that was growing at the time: the prophesied death of the fax machine.
Office Space premiered in 1999, just a year before the turn of the millennium. The characters in the film still use 3½-inch (90 mm) floppy disks, MS-Dos and an incredibly dated operating system on their Macs, all of which are virtually obsolete at this point in time. But faxing is still very alive and well, despite the onset of email, cloud storage and a digital age that has made it incredibly easy to share and send information over the Internet.
How Faxing Has Survived
Despite these doomsday predictions that fax would die by the end of the 20th century, the technology has not only survived, but thrived over the years (our company is a perfect example of this!).
Businesses from a variety of industries still fax, and many Fortune 10, 100 and 1000 companies still rely heavily on the technology today. If you have sensitive or private documents that need to be transmitted long distances, there is no better way to do it than via fax technology.
But you won’t find many old fax machines still chugging along in offices across the country (if you have one, we can definitely upgrade you to a RightFax server ASAP). The reason why faxing has survived its prophesied demise is not only because businesses still need it, but because the technology has evolved over time.
New Fax Technology Creates New Solutions
Faxing has entered the digital age through the Cloud (via Easylink fax), and remains today the most secure way to send financial, education, healthcare, etc. related documents. With a host of services including:
- Desktop Messaging
- Fax2Mail
- Production Messaging
- Document Capture and Management
- Workflow Services
Easylink fax helps you to improve productivity, reduce costs and decrease cycle times, all while managing your own fax infrastructure.
Why Not Just Use Email?
It’s easy to think that traditional email would just replace faxing once and for all, but regular email services are still inferior to faxing for many reasons, including:
- Security: standard email servers are not as secure as fax servers
- Compliance: it is far more easy to comply with HIPAA and other regulations using secure fax technology
- Size limits: most email services limit the size of files that can be transferred
- Spam: email filters can place incoming messages in spam folders, while faxes sent via FoIP or Fax2Mail have delivery confirmations.
Faxing Isn’t Going Anywhere
In less than 20 years, our team here at The Fax Guys have installed over 1,000 fax servers, and we still support more than 800 across the country. Businesses still fax, and the fax industry is looking as strong as ever.
To learn more about our fax installation and support services, contact our team today.
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