With the growing use of technology, the use of fax machines seems to be extinct but this is not actually the case. According to Ron Resnick, president, OrderSnapp, about 30% to 40% of clients deliver customer app and web orders via fax machines. He adds that he knows several restaurants sans internet access and hence, they use fax machines.
Many industries still consider fax machines a safe, secure, and reliable way to communicate even in the presence of the modern means of communication.
Resnick says that these restaurants have used the fax machines for a long time and it does not cost them extra. The medium has a great success rate.
OrderSnapp uses a service known as Phaxio. It is a connecting link between the two eras. The company calls it “faxing for developers.” It is basically a faxing provider. The APIs allow sending and receiving faxes with no worry about loading paper or toner in the machine or a fax cover sheet.
According to Howard Avner, cofounder, Phaxio, they try to keep it away from the sight of clients. Phaxio helps them build fax into the apps, as well as websites, with the APIs used for sending mail confirmations or tweeting. Even established companies have joined hands with Phaxio, Howard boasts. This latest intervention in the old-school fax keeps clients from worrying about line noise, busy signals, and fax machines.
Apart from Phaxio, there are other similar service providers like HelloFax and Free Fax.
According to Faxage, a service by EC Data Systems, it processes around 11 million minutes of fax transmissions each month.
Experts are of the opinion that fax is a safe medium. It offers complete security and privacy. Faxage works with some elite clients including high-tech medical testing companies, law firms, and other high-class businesses that demand privacy while transmitting documents.
According to the experts, sectors like mortgage banking, as well as insurance agencies need a well-guarded medium and consider email highly unsafe. Hence, they rely on faxes.
EC Data Systems’ president Christian Watts says that internal records of physicians do not utilize paper. They also do not consider another medium as safe as fax for online data transfer. So they use cloud-based fax providers to safely carry out the transfer of important documents.
For medical data, services like Faxage and Phaxio use HIPAA-complaint faxes. It allows the users to upload, as well as download the faxed documents via encrypted emails or SSL-enabled web connections.
Watts says that people consider faxes safer than any digital communication medium and hence, companies use fax machines and phone calls to prevent data breaches.
Fax is also a priority when it comes to requesting the documents from government agencies. According to MuckRock, a leading journalism startup which publishes and files FOIA requests, it sends around a dozen faxes every day via Faxaway, an email-to-fax service.
