Solution Overview
Cisco Lean Application Management—FAX Solution
What You Will Learn
Even as financial services organizations adopt advanced communications solutions in branch
offices, many continue to rely on conventional fax technologies for vital business communications.
®
These technologies are costly, difficult to manage, and often insecure. The Cisco Lean Application
Management—FAX solution provides a complete, cost-effective fax solution for branch offices
using the Cisco network you already have in place. The solution enables you to:
●
Lower overall branch office costs by eliminating dedicated analog fax circuits and fax
equipment, supplies, and maintenance
●
Eliminate the high capital and ongoing operational costs associated with dedicated fax
server hardware
●
Enhance productivity and responsiveness by allowing employees to send and receive faxes
from their desks
●
Secure sensitive fax transactions
●
Improve fax recordkeeping to comply with regulatory requirements such as the SarbanesOxley (SOX) Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
●
Enjoy much greater flexibility and control over fax communications
Challenge
Financial services organizations worldwide are extending unified communications to branch offices.
With the ability to converge data, voice, and video services onto a single network, these
organizations are lowering branch costs and helping employees work more productively and
collaboratively. But while voice, messaging, and conferencing in the branch have been transformed
by unified communications, one important communications tool is still often overlooked: fax.
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Solution Overview
Faxing remains a vital tool for a broad range of financial services companies. In fact, virtually every
major financial institution still relies on fax for important business communications in branch offices.
Fax may be used to:
●
Process multimillion-dollar transactions for global financial institutions
●
Transmit letters of intent, trades, orders, and confirmations
●
Exchange marked-up drafts and legally valid final versions of contracts
●
Transmit insurance claims and information that is protected under HIPAA or other
regulations
Despite the fact that millions of dollars may depend on fax communications being delivered in a
secure and time-sensitive manner, many branch offices continue to rely on legacy fax systems that
are inefficient, difficult to manage, and often insecure. As organizations move to improve fax
recordkeeping and security, they have turned to fax server solutions that are extremely expensive,
with high capital costs for servers, fax boards, and licenses, as well as high ongoing operational
costs for power, cooling, and maintenance. Even in smaller branch offices, conventional fax
machines carry high costs for supplies, maintenance, and dedicated analog fax circuits, and
employees must leave their desks every time they need to send or receive a fax.
Solution
The Cisco Lean Application Management—FAX solution is based on the unique integration of
Sagem-Interstar XMediusFAX fax-over-IP (FoIP) technology with a Cisco Application Extension
Platform (AXP) module for the Cisco Integrated Services Router. The Cisco AXP module provides
dedicated processing and storage resources to support the solution, and allows you to transmit,
route, copy, and archive fax communications as easily as any other IP traffic traversing your
network. Effectively, the solution converges a highly intelligent fax server with the Cisco voice
gateway you already have deployed in your branch office, providing a simple, elegant means of
adding fax to your IP network without any additional dedicated hardware or integration.
Figure 1 illustrates how the Cisco Lean Application Management—FAX solution provides a simpler,
more efficient solution than conventional branch fax systems.
Figure 1.
Cisco’s Approach to a Simpler Solution
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Solution Overview
Business Benefits
The Cisco Lean Application Management—FAX solution integrates fax communications with your
IP network to provide a highly efficient, cost-effective branch office fax solution. It lets you eliminate
insecure fax machines and fax server systems that are extremely costly to deploy and maintain,
and manage fax communications using the unified communications platform and Cisco Integrated
Services Router you already have in place. The Cisco Lean Application Management – FAX
solution:
●
Eliminates the need for dedicated fax servers, reducing both the capital costs of server
boxes, expensive fax boards, spares, and OS licenses; and ongoing power, cooling, and
maintenance costs
●
Reduces costs of dedicated analog fax circuits in branch offices, as well as the
environmental waste, paper, toner, and maintenance costs associated with conventional fax
machines
●
Boosts efficiency and productivity by allowing employees to send and receive faxes from
their PCs, instead of having to frequently leave their desks and walk to a fax machine
●
Supports business-critical communications more effectively by empowering employees to
send and receive faxes anywhere, anytime, on any IP-enabled device, including
smartphones or personal digital assistants (PDAs)
●
Boosts security by applying the same IP encryption and security mechanisms that
safeguard your sensitive data traffic to fax communications for the first time, and eliminating
the need to transmit faxes over publicly accessible fax machines
●
Simplifies compliance with regulatory and corporate requirements by making it easy to
archive all branch faxes to a centralized storage server
●
Fully integrates with your branch network and Windows Active Directory, allowing you to
route faxes directly to any recipient, archive, or multifunction printer
●
Supports automated faxing from enterprise applications such as SAP and Oracle
●
Dramatically expands branch fax system scalability, with the ability to handle six to eight
times the capacity of a dedicated fax server at a much lower cost
●
Improves the reliability of your fax communications by replacing fax servers and fax boards
that are prone to failure with a software-based solution that can be fully managed remotely
●
Extends the life of your fax system investment with a software-based solution that can
accommodate new standards and capabilities over time, versus hardware-based solutions
that require major new investments to upgrade technology
Why Cisco?
Cisco is a leader in the convergence of data, voice, and video, with proven expertise delivering
Unified Communications solutions that power the largest financial institutions in the world. With a
broad suite of intelligent, highly secure solutions for financial services institutions, Cisco can
provide a comprehensive network solution that brings intelligence, efficiency, and enhanced service
to every customer interaction.
Cisco’s focus on reliability, scalability, and security has made it a trusted solution provider for
mission-critical financial services environments. The Cisco Self-Defending Network continually
adapts to the challenges posed by evolving security threats and safeguards financial institutions
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Solution Overview
from both internal and external risks. Cisco networks give financial services organizations the
foundation they need to meet their branch-level legal, regulatory, and security challenges.
Cisco financial services solutions are:
●
Purpose-built to meet the unique business, security, and regulatory challenges of financial
institutions
●
Designed and engineered to unify all network and communications tools into a single,
secure, converged network
●
Built on open and evolving standards that can easily incorporate new and innovative
business processes, applications, and devices
●
Backed with world-class support through the award-winning Cisco Technical Assistance
Center (TAC)
●
Forward-looking with extensive roadmaps to continually support your business as it evolves
For More Information
To learn more about how the Cisco Lean Application Management—FAX solution and the Cisco
Connected Finance portfolio of solutions can help your business, visit:
http://www.cisco.com/go/financialservices.
Printed in USA
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
C22-518874-00 01/09
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