efax Corporate for Independent Agent Offices

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2 Overview Within the finance and insurance industries, independent agent offices have traditionally been an effective means for offering standardized services across diverse geographic regions. They provide a proven outlet for growing a brand and providing services with minimum exposure and operating cost to the parent company. One of the biggest challenges of this business model is maintaining a consistent level of service and control across the entire network of independent offices. Best practices implemented through institutional processes and procedures dictate the flow of applications, claims, and support and ensure that each office works efficiently and in a standardized manner. It is in the technology layer beneath the bureaucratic infrastructure that standardization becomes a much bigger problem. Privacy legislation illustrates the complexity of standardizing the infrastructure of multiple remote offices. In addition to federally mandated privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ( HIPAA ) and the Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 1999 ( GLBA ), individual states have begun passing their own privacy legislation. For instance, in 2010 Massachusetts passed a data protection law that is considered one of the strictest in the nation. This law mandates that all persons and businesses that maintain personal information must have an adequate protective system so as to prevent unauthorized access to personal information, and must also include firewall and malware protection, as well as encryption for all personal data transmitted through a public network or over a wire network. New laws such as this create real headaches for companies trying to maintain a consistent technology model for each branch office. Standardization on a single shared platform using the parent s domain is the most popular and important of these tools. It allows the company to maintain an audit trail that includes an archive of all traffic as well as to filter out personal customer information from the content. Using standardization as a base technology also allows for the implementation of other services, such as digital faxing, that use as their primary means of transport. The Move Towards Digital Faxing Fax usage has declined worldwide over the past twenty years but it still remains an important means of data exchange for the insurance and finance industries. Fax often exists within a single office in a variety of forms: traditional fax machines, multi-function copiers with integrated fax, or digital fax services. Managing compliance for this combination of hard and soft copy fax services can be especially challenging. The best that the parent company can hope for is that each office will make the transition from paper to digital faxing. The general wisdom is to get rid of the paper sound advice from a privacy standpoint. Fax machines and multifunction devices ( MFD ) create a number of potential scenarios where privacy can be compromised. Marketplace Solutions A common approach to this problem is for parent companies to provide their agent offices with a technology marketplace in which the independent agents can enroll in services. These marketplaces are typically in the form of web portals through which the home office can provide an array of compliant tools to the agent. Missing pages, or pages that walked off in someone else s fax. Documents written to the hard drive of an MFD. These machines are often owned by an outside vendor or they may not be included in an office s secure disposal policy for old equipment. Private documents sitting on a feeder tray in a public area. 1

3 Digital faxing through provides a greater degree of security while also improving productivity. Agents are at their desks instead of chasing pages or waiting for a fax transmission to complete. For this reason many companies have chosen to standardize their fax usage on a dedicated fax server. This server allows the users to send and receive faxes through their existing accounts. Inbound faxes arrive as PDF attachments; outbound faxing can be made available to all users and and can include rule enforcements such as branded cover pages. While fax servers have improved the landscape for document exchange, they are not without challenges of their own. Fax servers are limited by geography. In order to offer local fax numbers in each area another fax server must be installed at that location. Disaster recovery dictates a need for multiple servers at each site, and lengthy software and support licenses can further eat into ROI. Lastly, as many companies migrate their voice infrastructure to IP, they are finding that fax doesn t work consistently over SIP trunks or when changing from IP to TDM at the network edge. While fax usage has not declined in these industries as quickly as in other verticals, many companies have begun to question whether investing in fax servers for three years at a time (a typical license) is the best means for managing long-term needs. Fax as a Hosted Application A better solution than maintaining your own fax infrastructure is to outsource it. Hosted application refers to any software-based business tool provided and maintained by a third-party vendor and accessed remotely by the customer via an Internet connection. These applications have gained trust and credibility due to their economies of scale, rewarding budgetconscious adopters with a pay only for what you use pricing structure that complements today s leaner business models. Select benefits of hosted faxing include: Providing a simple interface that easily integrates with an existing system (with no need for add-ons). Eliminating geographical limitations. A dedicated provider can often give you service wherever your independent agent offices need it. Maintaining the stable TDM connections needed for high availability fax services with minimal disruptions. Since fax still works better on standard PSTN connections, your company can move forward with plans for an all-ip TELCO infrastructure while ensuring that your fax service does not lag or experience interruptions. The efax Corporate Advantage efax Corporate is the leading hosted Fax Messaging solution for global enterprises. It is a flexible, digital solution that allows sending and receiving faxes by using your PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. efax Corporate eliminates many of the costs associated with running local fax servers and machines equipment, supplies, licenses, etc. while replacing them with a predictable cost model that includes nearly unlimited scalability. 2

4 Consider these benefits that efax Corporate brings to your independent agent offices: Ease of deployment and scalability efax Corporate deploys in minutes, not days or weeks. Provide each employee a unique local or toll-free fax number for a truly scalable solution. You can also port your existing fax numbers over to the efax platform, then add local, toll-free, or international efax numbers as needed. efax Corporate integrates easily with Outlook and other accounts, as well as with most MFDs. Ease of use efax Corporate brings reliable, easy to use fax services to your desktop, laptop, tablets, or smartphone immediately, without disrupting your current faxing capacity or requiring employee downtime for training. Account access, built-in help files, and customer support 24/7/365 ensures that every user can send a fax whenever and wherever they need to. Robust Functionality The efax Corporate service includes a range of optional features to improve the functionality of a fax document. These include OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for searchable-text PDFs and efax Messenger desktop client (printer driver) with digitized signature support. Most importantly, these features are included with the service and don t require any additional licensing. Quality of service efax Corporate ensures its superior level of service by maintaining a global network of TELCOgrade call-locations equipped with environmental controls, business continuity support, power management and protective equipment designed to keep servers running at the highest service level. Together, this infrastructure ensures a 99.5% uptime, delivery times of 2-5 minutes, and unparalleled transmission security for over 12,000,000 clients in 49 countries. Centralized Administration Choosing a strong provider like efax Corporate is only the first of several implementation decisions when moving to a hosted provider. You also need to create a model for recovering the cost of the service availability as well as a means for putting the service into the hands of agents who require it.the centralized administration functions built into efax Corporate allows parent companies to assume billing responsibility and management for the digital fax service used by the agent offices. In addition to significant pricing advantages in negotiating a cost based on the total usage of all the users, the advantages of managing efax Corporate centrally include: Consistent User Management The efax Corporate service includes access to a secure, hosted web portal. From this web site, domestic and international fax numbers can be provisioned, users created, custom cover pages with logos and disclaimers assigned, and usage reports downloaded. It provides simple and secure access to all the features of the efax Corporate account system without creating overhead for the home office. Active Direction Integration Manage efax Corporate using the same system you use for providing accounts. efax Corporate easily integrates with Active Directory as well as any other LDAP-compliant directory service. LDAP and AD integration allows larger enterprises to manage attributes by AD Group Policy so they can update all users with a single operation. Integration with efax Corporate requires no modification to the directory schema. Self-Service Provisioning The efax Active Directory API can also be easily integrated into your existing market place of services. A user simply enters their name, address, and the desired geography of a new fax number and a new account is created for them remotely. Use access privileges to control which groups of employees can create accounts for themselves. 3

5 Compliance Creating a compliant digital fax offering using efax Corporate is made easier by building on top of your existing system. Encryption is available so that all fax- s sent between the fax vendor and parent company mail infrastructure are secure. efax Corporate offers enforced TLS (Transport Layer Security) with 256- bit encryption that meets even the strictest state and federal guidelines. Company Overview efax Corporate is part of publicly-traded j2 Global Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM). Founded in 1995, j2 Global provides outsourced, value-added messaging and communications services to individuals and businesses around the world. The Company offers fax, voic and document management solutions, Web-initiated conference calling and unified-messaging and communications services. j2 Global, the company behind efax Corporate is fully compliant with the HITECH Act and maintains customer accounts for nearly half the Fortune 500. efax Corporate provides guaranteed and proven expertise in handling private fax documents containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. Summary For enterprises with a network of independent agent offices, hosted faxing with efax Corporate offers compelling advantages over traditional server-based solutions, particularly for companies looking to build a strong framework to conduct, manage, and control document delivery over the long term. To learn more about efax Corporate, please visit us at You may contact our U.S. Enterprise Sales team at (toll free) or (direct). In the U.K. contact us at +44 (0) To learn more about j2 Global, please visit 4