Quick: aside from a physically printed/signed/watermarked hardcopy document, name a form of printed communications that has been legally accepted for decades? If you said “fax transmission,” you are right.
Today, fax communication remains a business‑critical tool in key industries such as healthcare, government, finance, insurance, manufacturing, and legal services. The reasons are many: Fax transmissions provide benefits like timestamps and verified delivery that have been trusted enough to be written into law. Fax protocols also offer a high level of data interoperability, and modern enterprise fax systems support workflow automation that can streamline organizational processes.
That said, traditional on‑prem fax infrastructure is costly, complex, and increasingly risky. To address this concern, LRS and EtherFax have worked together to create a new workflow that works directly with LRS’ MFPsecureScan device-resident embedded client. This new EtherFax workflow enables organizations to modernize faxing without disrupting established processes. Users gain secure, cloud‑based fax delivery directly from the multifunction printer (MFP), while IT teams benefit from simplified management, proven reliability, and significant cost savings.
Enterprise‑Grade Security You Can Trust
Security is often the primary reason fax still exists—and it’s where EtherFax excels.
EtherFax operates a patented Secure Exchange Network (SEN) that eliminates traditional phone lines and replaces them with fully encrypted, hybrid‑cloud IP delivery. Messages are encrypted both in transit and at rest, with robust authentication and detailed audit trails.
EtherFax maintains compliance with the most demanding regulatory standards, including HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST CSF, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP High authorization (2025) for government workloads. When combined with LRS’ MFPsecure/Scan software, documents are protected from the moment a user authenticates at the device through final delivery—helping prevent misrouted faxes, unsecured output trays, and compliance violations.
Flexible by Design for Mixed Fleets and Fax‑Heavy Industries
One of the most powerful advantages of this workflow is flexibility with regard to the hardware it can run on and industries it can support. LRS MFPsecure/Scan is engineered for mixed‑vendor printer environments and supports all major MFP manufacturers. As a result, enterprises can standardize fax and other document workflows without forcing device refresh cycles—a critical requirement for large, distributed fleets.
Trusted Across Fax‑Dependent Industries
LRS solutions are trusted by Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 organizations worldwide, supporting high‑volume document workflows across healthcare, manufacturing, government, banking, insurance, and logistics—sectors where fax is still a core operational dependency. The LRS-EtherFax integration ensures that existing fax‑based business processes are preserved while enabling a cloud‑first future.
Reliability and broad device support are crucial differentiators in this market. Fax failures aren’t minor inconveniences—they disrupt patient care, delay shipments, and create compliance risk. EtherFax solutions process billions of fax pages annually across the company’s global Secure Exchange Network, delivering high‑availability service with built‑in redundancy and disaster recovery. Likewise, LRS output management software provides a single, centralized point of control for delivery assurance, error recovery, and auditing—minimizing downtime and missed SLAs. The combined solution delivers enterprise‑class resiliency from the MFP to final destination.
Simplicity: One Workflow, One Platform
Clever integration of the EtherFax and LRS solutions lets customers organizations truly “kill two birds with one stone.” Instead of deploying, licensing, and maintaining one application for scanning and another for faxing, end users experience a single, secure, intuitive workflow right at the device. Documents are scanned and faxed in one step, with no additional client software or device‑side apps to manage.
Aside from increased efficiency for end users, this collaboration benefits IT staff by requiring fewer applications on the MFP, simplified updates and configuration, lower support overhead, and faster user adoption. Simplicity becomes a tangible operational advantage, not just a usability benefit.
Bottom-Line Benefits
While efficiency is satisfying, cost savings is the driving priority in most organizations. EtherFax solutions eliminate many expenses of legacy fax infrastructure like fax servers and boards, analog phone lines and long‑distance fees, maintenance contracts, and fax‑related downtime and troubleshooting. In fact, industry research cited by EtherFax shows cloud fax solutions can reduce fax‑related costs by up to 80% while improving processing speed by 50%. Organizations shift from capital‑intensive infrastructure to a predictable operating expense model, freeing IT resources for higher‑value initiatives.
LRS output management solutions likewise eliminate unnecessary hardware, software, and maintenance costs related to traditional print-server based output networks. An international survey of LRS customers indicated a 97% reduction in print servers required, yielding a five‑year ROI of 486%. The average customer surveyed saved $1.6 million and saw a payback period of less than 12 months on their LRS software investment.
Conclusion: Secure Fax, Simplified
The new EtherFax workflow inside LRS MFPsecure/Scan software is more than a feature—it’s a strategic upgrade for organizations that still rely on fax but demand modern security, flexibility, and efficiency. By combining EtherFax’s secure cloud fax network with LRS’ enterprise‑proven capture and workflow platform, organizations gain a future‑ready fax solution that reduces risk, cuts costs, and simplifies management. Better yet, the solution just works—directly from the MFP.