You Can Help Them Secure the Other Half — and Create a New Revenue Stream for Your Business
Ask your customers about their fax security. Assuming they’ve joined the 21st century and upgraded from fax machines and servers to a cloud fax solution (and if they haven’t, have we got a lucrative idea for you!), they will probably tell you about transmission security and encryption.
Most cloud fax services today, particularly those offering solutions for large enterprises, offer some level of protection for business faxes while in transit from sender to recipient. For many of these cloud fax vendors, that protection is Secure Socket Layer (SSL), a security protocol for data traveling over the Internet. In the case of a fax transmission, SSL will set up a link between the two fax numbers (sender and recipient), and then encrypt the fax before sending it.
That’s fine — for the momentary transmission portion of a fax’s life. Although keep in mind that SSL is now an inferior and outdated protocol for data transmissions — and the more sophisticated cloud fax providers, like eFax Corporate®, employ the far better Transport Security Layer (TLS). Indeed, eFax Corporate uses the newer, higher-security 1.2 version of TLS for our customers’ faxes.
But there’s a lot more to the fax security story.
The Other Half of Fax Security — Which Your Customers Probably Forget.
We’ve extensively covered the details of fax transmission security in previous posts (like this one). That is a vital component of a business’s overall data protection, and it can even affect an organization’s compliance (or noncompliance) with federal regulations governing data privacy.
But this is only part of the fax security question. When your customer sends a fax containing sensitive data — a financial statement to a client, for example, or a patient’s personally identifiable information to an insurance company — that fax traverses the Internet (or the telephone lines) for just a moment or two before reaching the recipient’s fax machine.
Then your customer stores a copy of the fax that it just sent, presumably forever. How secure is that part of the process?
Note: There is a good chance that most of your customers have no mechanism for storing their faxes that provides anything even approaching the level of security they apply to those same faxes in transmission. With the sophisticated cloud fax service from eFax Corporate, you can offer these customers the 24/7, lifetime fax security (both in transit and “at rest” in storage) that their business needs.
Are Your Customers’ Stored Faxes Already Secure?
Here’s where we suggest you open the discussion with your customers, by asking them what if any process they have in place for protecting their stored or archived business faxes. We’re confident many of your customers will fall short of the levels of security they’d need to truly protect their data—and to stay on the right side of federal regulators.
To understand what real security means in terms of stored electronic faxes, your customers would need to be working with a cloud fax solution that stored their faxes in secure, offsite data centers — ideally Tier III and Tier IV secure colocations — with at least these levels of physical, onsite protection:
- Video surveillance at all hours
- Guards on duty day and night
- Access restricted to those presenting badges or passing a biometric test (such as a fingerprint scan)
- Data stored across multiple servers for redundancy
Any cloud fax vendor offering fax storage security that does not meet these guidelines isn’t truly protecting your customers’ data. And as we’ve pointed out, this can put at risk your customers’ overall business security as well as their regulatory compliance.
The good news is, as an eFax Corporate partner, you can offer your customers the leading cloud fax solution for enterprises — and the service offering businesses the highest levels of stored-fax security anywhere in the industry.
How You Can Help Your Customers Secure Their Stored Faxes:
eFax Corporate, often complemented by eFax Secure™ in highly regulated business environments, is entrusted every day as part of the eFax portfolio’s transmission of millions of pages to handle businesses’ sensitive corporate documents in the most heavily regulated industries. Our proven process helps enterprises meet the strictest federal mandates regarding data transfer, tracking and storage.
And this solution is now part of our support-driven, high-touch, lucrative Partner Program. Please visit our eFax Corporate Partner page to learn more.
