GFI SOFTWARE: COVID-19 ACCELERATED TRANSITION TO DIGITAL FAXING

Faxing is still relied upon mainly in the healthcare, financial, manufacturing, legal and government sectors – a third still use paper faxes.

PRAGUE, Jan. 26, 2022 – GFI Software, a provider of enterprise network security solutions, said one of the overlooked consequences of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is the changes in fax communications. A number of organisations have decided to move to solutions that allow remote users who, for example, must work from home due to isolation, to send and receive fax messages.

For example, according to a survey by TechGenics, more than a third of respondents in selected industries use traditional paper faxes, 20% use a software fax server, and 16% use cloud or SaaS solutions. The advent of the pandemic two years ago and various lockdowns caused many organizations to stop faxing altogether or were forced to move fax machines to employees’ home offices due to the lack of staff in their offices. The consequence has been an increased demand for digital (software or online) faxing, which allows faxing from anywhere. The option of switching from paper to digital was considered by 12% of respondents at the time of the covid.

Faxing is mainly used by industries that are tied to strict regulatory requirements, such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, legal firms and public sector institutions. Its main advantages are:

• Faxing technologies and protocols are resistant to malware attacks.
• Unlike legitimate emails intercepted by anti-spam filters, faxing guarantees 100% delivery of important documents such as business proposals.
• They comply with the most stringent industry regulations to protect personal information, typically in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, police, courts, etc.
• Many offices keep paper documents for various reasons.
• Digital faxes can be integrated with e-mail systems.

“Even though faxing seems to be an outdated technology nowadays, it is a key communication alternative for many organizations,” said Marie Baranová, Sales Manager for GFI Software solutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia at ZEBRA SYSTEMS.

GFI FaxMaker is a popular fax server that provides online faxing without the need for traditional fax hardware. It allows users to send and receive faxes electronically via a web interface, email client or other integrated application from any location and device. GFI FaxMaker’s customers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia include UNIPETROL SERVICES, s.r.o. and a number of state and municipal sector organizations. GFI FaxMaker Online is used by Zentiva Group, a.s., where the deployment project was implemented by Mainstream Technologies, a GFI Software partner.

Received and sent faxes can be archived using the GFI Archiver solution.