In light of recent changes in Cybersecurity and PDPA Laws as well as industry regulations, it’s time to look at fax more critically. There remain a number of industries where Fax communication is still necessary. The Legal, Finance, and Healthcare industries are examples. For organizations in such industries, the faxes carry business-critical information as well as sensitive personal data. If you are responsible for fax communications in your organizations, you may wish to review and ensure your fax communication system and processes remain in compliance with relevant regulations and guidelines.
Here are some aspects you may want to think about:
Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA)
A clause in the PDPA states that an organization shall protect personal data in its possession by making reasonable security arrangements to prevent unauthorized access.
Fax server systems have been in the market for decades. The technology and processes are matured and proven. For very little investment, you can benefit from productivity gains and be safe in the knowledge that your critical and confidential data are protected.
Data Loss Prevention
Most organizations these days have DLP systems in place to ensure sensitive data are not easily sent out from email without prior approvals. Yet, staff members have unfettered access to send any documents by fax. What’s more regular fax machines may not even have the capability to record who sent what and when.
Electronic fax server systems usually have comprehensive user access control and all incoming and outgoing fax communications are logged with both metadata as well as the actual fax images. Such features enable effective preventive and detective controls.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Is your fax machine located in a publicly accessible location? Does your fax machine receive copies of Identity Cards (IC), credit card statements, birth certificates, bank statements, CPF, and salary slips?
An obvious mitigation measure would be to relocate the fax machine to a controlled area of your office? But who and how do you control access to that fax machine?
An electronic fax server system not only has comprehensive user access control. They can be managed as easily as any of your IT systems or be integrated into your enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.
What is more crucial is that incoming faxes are routed and delivered only to intended recipients and not printed and left for everyone to read. There is also no opportunity for an absent-minded staff member to fax and then leave a copy of the document in the feeder.
Data Retention policy
Are your fax communications archived in accordance with your company’s and regulator’s data retention requirements? Is there a more efficient way than filing and storing all those paper faxes?
Electronic fax server systems automatically digitize all fax communications and allow you to set preferences for auto-archiving to online and offline storage. What’s more, they are easy to search, retrieve and backed up.
Electronic Fax Solutions enable you to control, automate and integrate with your enterprise, solving these problems. With over 19 years of expertise in Fax Server Solutions, we helped many organizations solve these problems. Would you like to see one running in your organization? Reach us at sales@inoks.com