How green is cloud fax?

A good way of looking at the environmental impact of cloud fax is to first look at the alternative. The paper industry uses a huge amount of resources, creates pollution on an extraordinary scale and requires massive amounts of energy. Cloud fax is light-years ahead of traditional manual fax in terms of environmental impact. It is clear that decreasing paper use and moving towards digital storage and transfer methods is a far more environmentally friendly approach to business than using paper for everything.

Environmental Impact of Paper
13.8 million trees are cut down every year in order to make fax paper for businesses, and the pulp mills that are used in paper manufacture cause water, land and air pollution. 35% of all trees harvested are used to make paper, and around 35% of municipal solid waste is paper. Even recycling paper can cause environmental damage, as the de-inking process creates large quantities of sludge, sometimes weighing as much as 22% of the weight of the recycled paper.

The pulp and paper industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy in the world, with 4% of energy use being part of this industry. It also uses more water per ton of product than any other industry in existence.

Sfax allows customers to annotate documents with text, rectangles, circles, crosses, check marks and also digitally, and more importantly, legally sign documents without having to print the document at all, ultimately saving them money on paper and ink costs.

Why Cloud Fax is Green
The environmental impact of cloud fax is tiny. Business computers are already running most of the time, so no energy is wasted sending and receiving documents. The servers used by cloud faxing companies are chosen specifically for their energy use profile and are the only step in the entire cloud-faxing equation where extra energy is needed.

Server Room Efficiency
Thanks to clever technological advancements in recent years, cloud fax server rooms do an excellent job of making the most efficient use of their energy possible. Dynamic provisioning means that server capacity can be changed on the fly to deal with shifts in demand over time, so servers are only working when they need to be. Cloud fax server rooms are also constructed, equipped and supported in sensible ways in order to minimize waste and provide the best level of service possible to clients, with the least possible energy use.

Switching away from the messy, wasteful practice of manual fax and embracing modern technology will save your business money on energy bills, ink and paper. It will also put your mind at ease about the security and environmental impact of your choice of data transfer protocol. Manual fax is wasteful, damages the environment and is prohibitively expensive. Email is inherently insecure. Cloud fax is the clear choice.