When you receive a fax through your eFax Secure account, the service automatically and immediately encrypts the fax — using 256-bit encryption — and stores it securely in your eFax account online while notifying you (via email) that the fax is available.

Included in this email notification is a URL. When you click on the link, a Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection is made and you will be prompted for your eFax Secure credentials (login ID and PIN) to view the fax. eFax Corporate has upgraded from SSL encryption to the newer and even more secure TLS encryption protocol.

No sensitive information is ever directly transmitted, as the fax remains on our server – you view it from there. Additionally, the fax can remain encrypted and securely stored as long as you need it, reducing strain on your local email servers and storage devices.

eFax has secure servers in multiple data centres rated Tier-III or higher (for N+1 redundancy) offer 99.98% availability. The eFax Corporate global network is protected by firewall, redundancy and security technologies, which ensure a 99.5% uptime, rapid delivery times and unparalleled transmission security. Our redundant servers, connections, storage points, and PSTN carrier partners provide a true enterprise solution
that will compensate for the loss of a single colocation.

The short answer to this question is, it depends. The more complete answer is that sending a fax, like using any other means of technology for document transmission, is neither inherently secure nor insecure. It all depends on how it’s done.

Using a standard desktop fax machine to send a paper fax is not as secure as your company needs that transmission to be — for both the security of the data itself and for your compliance with any data-privacy regulations governing your industry. This is partly because such faxes are transmitted over the public telephone network, and partly because a paper fax left sitting on an office fax machine can be viewed by unauthorized personnel.

The right cloud-based digital fax service, on the other hand, can be highly secure. Such services use the strongest-available encryption for fax documents both while they’re actually in-transit (TLS 1.2 encryption) and after they’ve been sent and are sitting in cloud storage (AES 256-bit encryption) for record-keeping and regulatory purposes.

Indeed, the right cloud fax services employ many additional layers of security to protect fax documents in transmission and at rest — such as passwords to limit who can access the fax online, and secure data centres to protect archived fax files 24/7.

Simply put, email was not designed with any privacy or security in mind. In fact, there are essentially four points at which an email is vulnerable to compromise — the email sender’s device, the mail servers where it is stored, the network it travels across, and the email recipient’s device.

You can password-protect your employees’ email accounts, but that works only if they regularly log out. A desktop machine open and logged in to an employee’s email client, or a mobile device without password protection, can leave email vulnerable to breach.

Even if you solve for those exposure points, though, the message still has to traverse a network to reach its recipient — and security and encryption here are vital. Moreover, email is briefly stored on several servers along its journey — many of which do not use security protocols to protect the data.

Many email programs also still use the outdated Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to secure the data over the Internet. And as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains, the US government’s position is that even the most updated version of Secure Socket Layer — the now nearly two-decade-old SSL 3.0 — is vulnerable to attack from hackers.

A federal government-calibre digital fax service, by contrast, provides protection for organizations of all sizes against these inherent weak points in email.

For example, the right digital fax service keeps all inbound and outbound faxes protected on a secure, password-protected website. In other words, when an employee in your company receives a digital fax by email, the email itself contains only a message that there is a fax waiting, along with a secure URL in the message. When the employee clicks that link, she is required to enter her digital fax PIN to access the fax.

Also, whereas many email programs still use the outdated and vulnerable SSL for email security, the best-in-class digital fax services use the most advanced version of the Transport Layer Security protocol, TLS 1.2.

Of course, many digital fax services do not employ TLS encryption — so this should be a key factor in selecting the right digital fax provider.

To ensure secure faxing of classified or sensitive documents, you should upgrade your organization’s fax infrastructure from a legacy system of fax machines or fax servers and phone lines to an enterprise-calibre cloud-fax solution.

When you deploy a secure cloud-fax service, you enhance both the convenience and the security levels of your business faxing at the same time. Cloud faxing means your staff can send and receive fax documents by email — using the most advanced encryption protocols to secure the fax while it’s in transit, and then leveraging the most sophisticated security systems to keep those faxes secure at rest, for as long as you want.

With Secure User ID functionality from eFax Corporate®, every individual at your company can send and receive faxes by email with an added layer of security. That’s because your Secure User ID is linked directly to a private login portal where the data is stored using the most sophisticated security and encryption protocols available. We provide as many Secure User IDs as you need, and they can all be managed easily with a single Administrator account.