Adding More Security To RingCentral's Cloud-Based Faxing Service
Around 6 months ago, a medical imaging company contacted RingClone to find a solution for a unique challenge they were encountering while upgrading their fax machines. Being in the medical field, this customer relies heavily on fax communication when transferring medical images between locations. However, many of their fax machines were aging, and were becoming difficult and expensive to maintain. They desired to move their faxing capabilities to a cloud environment to outsource the maintenance of the faxing hardware. However, being in the medical field presents this customer with a unique challenge. There are certain HIPAA rules that restrict the transmission of medical documents in fax cloud environments. This restriction essentially prevented them from migrating to a cloud environment.
After approaching us with this problem, we presented the customer with a solution that enables them to fully migrate to a cloud based faxing solution, using the RingClone system to meet the fax HIPAA requirements necessary for medical organizations.
The Solution
RingClone integrates with the api of RingCentral, a VOIP cloud service provider that provides cloud fax services. Leveraging this integration, RingClone captures faxes for the customer that are submitted via the RingCentral fax interface. RingClone then pushes the faxed documents through secure channels, leveraging symmetric-key encryption and the 256-bit AES algorithm. These documents are pushed directly to the customer's on-premises file server, ready to be consumed by the recipients (see fig 1).
RingClone's unique file template and folder template features enable all faxed documents to be placed in corresponding folders for each user, department, or organization, and allows an easy integration into the customer's existing naming conventions. This is accomplished by injecting the fax metadata retrieved from the RingCentral api into the RingClone folder/file builder according to the custom template built by the customer (see fig 2).
Using this technique, RingClone was able to transfer faxes between numerous medical offices securely for the customer. It allowed the customer to consolidate faxing for all offices into one single portal, and also allowed for staff to retrieve faxes in the same workflow they are accustomed to. In addition, data and fax documents are synced in near real time, with no noticeable delay for fax delivery. To date, over 249,338 faxes have been transferred successfully and securely using this method.