Fax to email risks highlighted
The service has caught on because it’s a fast and efficient way to transmit data without having to walk to a fax machine. And because the email goes directly to a recipient’s in-box, the sender is confident the document is not languishing in a pile of unread faxes.
But there is a growing concern that the technology is less secure than it initially appeared, and companies could fall foul of tougher data protection rules, warns Craig Freer, MD of faxing experts Vox Amvia.
“Regulatory requirements such as the Protection of Personal Information Bill, Basel II and King III put the onus on companies to guarantee the integrity of information and data, and the authorities are going to come down hard on companies that don’t comply,” he says.
“One of the biggest concerns is fax to email because it takes private data like bond applications and credit applications and puts it in an environment that is fundamentally not secure. So a bank using fax to email is putting confidential information at risk.”
Fax has traditionally been a secure delivery method because it is point-to-point, and because an audit trail shows where and when it was sent from, when it was received, and whether anyone tried to tamper with the content.
Most fax to email systems divert the outgoing document to a third party service provider that operates a fax to email server. The service provider wraps the document in an email and forwards it to the recipient. Yet neither the customer nor the recipient has any control over the data as it travels, putting themselves at risk. Fax to email can also be altered for fraudulent purposes.
That is a clear breach of legal requirements to prevent unauthorised access to private data and to document its history of access and usage. “Fax to email is a regulatory concern because companies don’t have any audit trail to see if the information has been interfered with,” says Freer.
The solution is to have the fax to email capability on the customer’s premises so no third parties are involved. Companies should also make sure employees do not sign up for a free, private fax to email service and use it for corporate data.
Price has been a drawback, however, since Telkom will only allow a company to run up to 300 direct inward dial numbers on their PRI line at a cost of about R35 a month per user. That makes it financially prohibitive to give each employee their own fax number.
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