In the modern business world, knowledge can literally become power. Companies hire people to reverse engineer the secrets of a competitor's products, so that they make a superior product. Industrial espionage is conducted by rival corporations to preempt and outmaneuver one another while moving into a new market they plan to tap into. Spies are sent to learn the plans for advertising campaigns of their rivals to evaluate and assess how their own ads would fare, allowing them to adjust accordingly. In the modern business world, secrecy is something that must be maintained whenever possible.
Trade secrets have to be kept secret from most anyone outside of the company, and perhaps even within the company. Just take a look at the shady history of the rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi if you want proof that industrial espionage is a dangerous thing. The tactics and counter-tactics exchanged by business rivals, particularly the ones that are multinational and tap into the same market at the same time, can get really ugly, really fast. However, this fact must not be allowed to hamper communications between the offices, as that would effectively give “the enemy” the advantage. So, despite the possibility of rivals getting their hands on copies of communications that are not to be made public, the main offices still send out messages to their satellites.
For some companies, making widespread use of Internet faxing can help in maintaining the security of their trade secrets and corporate plans. The transmission method has about the same speed of e-mail, but also has the added benefit of additional security. The encryption technology being used can be difficult to crack if you don't have access to the same security software. This can help counter industrial espionage in two ways.
First, the encryption can be used to protect whatever information was actually in the document being sent. This can include anything from marketing plans to prototype specifications for the next big project that the company is planning to unleash on the world market. Preventing rivals and spies from finding out the contents of the document, or at least delaying the discovery, can sometimes be critical in the long-term strategies of some companies. Naturally, this sort of cutthroat world is not a universal thing among multinational corporations, but the more heated the competition in an industry is, the more need there will be for this sort of strategy.
The other method is to use the encrypted documents as distractions. By most accounts, people trying to spy on you will consider the documents you protect to be the most important ones. Hackers are more likely to want to challenge themselves and hack into encrypted documents rather than ones that are left open for anyone to look at. By sending out a relatively unimportant document (as completely falsified information may or may not be illegal, depending on the jurisdiction) that is heavily encrypted, it is possible to distract industrial spies by taking attention away from the document that is actually important.
There are countless ways that companies use to prevent becoming a victim of industrial espionage. Internet faxing is just one of those methods, but it can have an impact. With the intensity level of the competition in today's business environment, the “any weapon in hand” philosophy is prevalent when it comes to safeguarding company secrets.
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