https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2020 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2020 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Digital Service Providers
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • CHANNEL PARTNERS ONLINE
 Channel Futures

From the Industry


The Half of the Secure-Faxing Equation Your Customers Are Probably Neglecting

  • Written by eFax Corporate Guest Blog
  • April 29, 2015
Your financial-industry customers are likely neglecting half of the secure-faxing equation: storage at rest. Here's how to help them enhance the security and regulatory compliance of their business faxes by moving their fax infrastructure to the cloud.

In a previous MSP Mentor post we discussed the substantial revenue opportunity we see for managed service providers like you in helping your customers enhance the security and regulatory compliance of their business faxes by moving their fax infrastructure to the cloud.

In that post, we discussed common vulnerabilities that exist in many businesses’ faxing processes–lack of privacy, chain-of-custody problems with paper faxes and the risk in failing to securely archive old faxes electronically.

It’s worth expanding on that third pitfall–businesses failing to securely store their faxes electronically–particularly for heavily regulated industries such as financial services. For your finance-industry customers, securely archiving and storing their old faxes 24/7 can be a vital step in protecting critical business data, and even in complying with federal regulations.

More to the point: It’s entirely possible your customers are not currently implementing these mission-critical measures, and that creates a real opportunity for you if you have the right cloud fax solution to offer them.

The Half of the Fax-Security Equation That Many Businesses Forget

Most online fax services offer some type of security for faxes in transit–Secure Socket Layer (SSL), for example, which establishes a secure connection over the Internet between fax sender and fax recipient, and then encrypts the data during transmission for good measure. The better services, like eFax Corporate, offer TLS for a higher level of security.

But that transmission journey–although obviously important–represents at most only a few minutes of an online fax’s life. What happens to it then?

If your customer is in the finance industry–say, a brokerage house–and receives a fax from one of its customers (containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial data), what the company does with that fax for the long term can make all the difference in whether the data remains secure and the business stays on the right side of SOX and other federal regulations.

That’s the half of the fax-security equation most businesses neglect: the fax at rest, where it may well remain for years or even decades for reasons of record keeping, auditability and legal discovery.

And many online fax services do not offer sufficient security or controls for their cloud-based storage of your old faxes.

What True Stored-Fax Security Entails

So, what does securely storing old faxes mean? Is it enough for your customers to keep them archived in their corporate email accounts, which require passwords to access? Not even close.

True security for your customers’ cloud-based faxes means the online fax service they use stores them on secure servers, in secure offsite data centers, where this mission-critical data is protected 24/7 by:

  1. Storage redundancy (in case of server failure or natural disaster)
  2. Biometric access
  3. Badge requirement
  4. Video surveillance of the facility 24/7/365

Plus, all of the servers that house your customers’ data should be at Tier III or Tier IV colocations, which are highly secure data centers with redundant architecture and servers guaranteeing 99.982% availability.

In our view, anything less than these parameters for fax storage does not offer an adequate level of protection, reliability and regulatory compliance for your finance-industry customers.

How These Fax-Security Measures Affect Compliance

As if the security of their proprietary data weren’t enough reason for your customers to re-examine the security of their fax processes–up to and including what happens to their faxes when they go dormant, into digital storage, for the long-term–these processes also have a direct effect on your finance-industry customers’ compliance with SOX and GLBA.

Compliance with the finance industry’s key regulation–GLBA–demands that businesses put processes in place to protect the privacy of personally identifiable information about a financial institution’s customers. That responsibility extends beyond the need to ensure customer data sent and received by fax, for example, is always transmitted securely (e.g., encrypted).

Even after your finance-industry customer has received by fax, say, a tax form or stock-purchase request from a customer, it has an ongoing responsibility–forever–to keep that customer information confidential.

The best way to achieve this level of regulatory compliance is to put the business’s entire fax infrastructure in the cloud–with no paper that can be left accidentally on a fax machine–and then ensure the digital copy of the fax is stored securely at a compliant offsite data center, where it’s protected 24/7 with redundant security processes.

SOX compliance requires third-party audits of any aspect of publicly traded companies that could affect those companies’ income statements.

When it comes to faxing, if your customer sends or receives documents such as purchase orders, employment offers, timesheets or invoices, those faxes become part of the material that falls under SOX’s third-party audits.

This means your finance-industry customer needs a highly organized process in place for indexing, archiving, storing and then making easily retrievable any such fax document–often on little notice from a third-party auditor. This is one reason a secure solution for online-fax storage is so valuable–indeed, necessary–for businesses in the finance industry and particularly those that are publicly traded.

How You Can Offer Such a Secure-Faxing Solution

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.

Peter Ely is Leader, Channels, Enterprise Marketing. Currently responsible for the Enterprise Partner Program for j2 Cloud Services, Peter is a 27-year technology veteran, having held senior executive positions looking after Presales Support, Product Management,  Product Marketing and Technical Evangelist teams in the telecommunications and data networking arenas in positions located across two continents and three countries. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

 

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs From the Industry

Related


  • data migration
    The Right Data Migration Tool Helps Schools Move to Cloud During COVID Crisis
    Effective data migration tools enable schools to move to a secure cloud environment, making applications and content easier to access, as well as mitigating the risk of data loss.
  • backup and recovery cloud
    Cloud-Based CRM: What SMBs Need to Know about Backup and Recovery
    The cloud makes CRM more accessible to SMBs, but solutions must be layered with backup and recovery.
  • cybersecurity predictions
    Cybersecurity: What to Expect in 2021
    Remote work is here to stay (and other cybersecurity predictions for the year ahead).
  • Ransomware and malware
    Help Your Customers Mitigate Malware: Viruses, Worms, and Trojans…Oh My!
    With the right antivirus protection, your customers can better detect and prevent the spread of malware.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • Cloud Migration Hurdles—and How to Overcome Them
  • How FortiSOAR Can Help MSSPs Provide Differentiated Service Portfolios
  • How to Mitigate the Risk of Social Engineering and BEC Attacks
  • 2021 Trends: Set the Stage for a Successful 2021

Galleries

View all

New, Changing Partner Programs: AWS, Tech Data, Avaya, Verizon

January 11, 2021

Industry Perspectives

View all

The Right Data Migration Tool Helps Schools Move to Cloud During COVID Crisis

January 19, 2021

Cloud-Based CRM: What SMBs Need to Know about Backup and Recovery

January 19, 2021

Cybersecurity: What to Expect in 2021

January 19, 2021

Webinars

View all

Who’s Behind the Mask? Hacker Personas Explained

January 26, 2021

Your Network Perimeter Has Changed

February 18, 2021

How Managed Hosting Providers Thrive with the Alternative Cloud

February 24, 2021

White Papers

View all

Why Subscription Business Model

January 15, 2021

The Ultimate MSP Guide to Sales Efficiency

January 14, 2021

Eight Reasons Why MSPs Need IT Industry-Specific Sales Tools

January 14, 2021

Upcoming Events

View all

Channel Partners Virtual

March 2, 2021 - March 4, 2021

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

November 1, 2021 - November 4, 2021

Videos and Fastchats

View all

FASTCHAT: How SOAR Eliminates Security Challenges and Elevates Service Provider Revenues

January 6, 2021

Happy Holidays from Channel Partners & Channel Futures!

December 21, 2020

FASTCHAT: How Old, Unpatched Technologies Are Creating New Security Threats for MSPs and Their Customers

December 3, 2020

Twitter

ChannelFutures

Legal experts say @VMware's #lawsuit against @nutanix's new CEO holds little weight. dlvr.it/Rr48FJ https://t.co/oLxPhgvgAt

January 21, 2021
ChannelFutures

bit.ly/2Y0kFZh twitter.com/Craig_Galbrait…

January 21, 2021
ChannelFutures

Our latest #Cybersecurity Roundup features @BitSight and @kovrrIns, @Vectra_AI and @AppOmniSecurity,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

January 20, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@solarwinds hackers target @Malwarebytes, impacting internal emails. #cybersecurity dlvr.it/RqzkZp https://t.co/aWqLjCCW9y

January 20, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@citrix $2.25 deal to acquire @wrike expands @CitrixPartners network into collaborative work management.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

January 20, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@Carbonite Migrate uses real-time replication to move workloads to #cloud with minimal risk and near-zero downtime… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

January 20, 2021
ChannelFutures

Backup and recovery is essential for #cloud-based CRMs @ConnectWise #SaaS #dataprotection #cloudbackup #databackup… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

January 19, 2021
ChannelFutures

You an #MSSP looking to avoid a #SolarWinds-type breach? @Asigra, @Barracuda, @CynetSystems give advice. Don’t blam… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

January 19, 2021

MSSP Insider

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Channel Partners Online

Want more? Find more channel news and analysis on our sister site, Channel Partners.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Online
  • Channel Partners Events
  • MSP 501
  • MSSP Insider
  • IoT World Today
  • Webhostingtalk

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2021 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X