Solution Overview

© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 4

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 Sarbanes-Oxley (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.

Solution Overview

© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 4

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

Solution Overview

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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

Solution Overview

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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.

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