For most IT teams in 2026, maintaining legacy fax servers is more of a distraction than a value-add.
It’s not just that fax server upkeep is unglamorous. Rather, it demands a skill set that overlaps less and less with the abilities that support cloud adoption, cybersecurity, automation, and AI mandates. In other words, fax server overhead is constant, specialized, and misaligned with where leaders want their teams to focus.
Managed services for RightFax (now known as OpenText Fax) absorb fax maintenance, monitoring, and daily operations while in-house IT retains control over security, policy, and integrations. The underlying product and feature set are unchanged, but operational responsibilities shift to a highly specialized team.
RightFax environments demand consistent attention, and that attention competes with countless other priorities that are expected to move the needle. Even well-run deployments trigger ongoing tasks: patches, hotfixes, carrier tickets, capacity checks, integration upkeep, and so forth. These tasks are obviously important, but their mindshare tends to outscale their value.
All these day-to-day tasks are often handled by one or two specialists. This creates a degree of key person risk, compounded by the reality that most of their peers both need and prefer to focus on newer technologies.
Finally, compliance is burdensome in regulated sectors such as healthcare. In addition to good security practices, healthcare IT teams are tasked with complex logging and retention policies, audit readiness criteria, and documentation standards.
This year, we expect an uptick in the pace of migrations from on-prem RightFax to managed services, freeing up capacity for more strategic technical priorities. Three reasons underlie our prediction.
Today, managed RightFax is a hardened, repeatable model. Enterprise providers offer pre-secured architectures, preconfiguration based on decades of firsthand experience, healthcare-ready workflows, and disciplined runbooks for upgrades, DR, and incident response. After years of continuous improvement, maturity is simply baked in.
Teams are smaller, systems are more complex, and tolerance for downtime is minimal. Many RightFax customers can’t justify dedicated staffing, but can’t accept outages or recurring failures, either. A well-managed RightFax service not only takes on routine tasks, but offers a fundamentally more resilient architecture that benefits from decades of industry best practices.
The broader move to digital and cloud telephony introduced new integration points and failure types. Deep skills at the intersection of modern telephony and legacy faxing are getting rarer and costlier. Managed services absorb that complexity and stabilize delivery.
In a managed RightFax model, the service provider handles day-to-day tasks and most updates and escalations (including troubleshooting, telephony, and vendor support). These are usually subject to an SLA. The custom retains ownership of policies, integrations, and security, and can optionally keep portions of fax infrastructure in-house if preferred.
A mature RightFax partner owns the technical backbone:
Depending on the customer’s needs, these tasks can be covered by SLAs.
It’s become a truism that IT teams are stretched thin, but some still want or need to own certain pieces of fax infrastructure. That discussion leads to one of three options:
In all cases, governance stays internal while the operational overhead is offloaded. The customer organization retains ownership of security policies, access controls, integration strategy, approvals, and any other tasks it wants or needs to oversee.
There’s often a gap between how managed fax providers operate in the best case and how they handle industry-specific complexities under pressure. Here are a few initial questions to help pinpoint whether a potential partner actually reduces—or merely shifts—risk and complexity.
Look for clear answers around encryption, access controls, audit logging, and incident response. A mature provider should be able to explain how audit data is generated, retained, and reviewed without relying on manual reconstruction or customer intervention.
Established providers will generally have case studies of migrations that significantly reduced failure rates. Ask how they achieved those results systematically, what you can realistically expect, and what that expectation is based on.
RightFax is a linchpin of mission-critical workflows. A credible partner should be able to point to previous integrations with EHRs/EMRs, document management systems, legacy interfaces (like COM APIs), MFPs, and any specialized systems your organization depends on.
Managed should not mean opaque. Look for clear metrics, trend reporting, and root-cause analysis so IT stays informed without being pulled back into day-to-day troubleshooting.
In-house RightFax has been a prudent choice for many teams over many years. But in 2026, managed services may free up capacity for strategic initiatives, improve fax reliability, and absorb changes in the application and telephony landscapes.
Reach out today to discuss your fax objectives, and learn how some of our largest clients already benefit from managed services for OpenText Fax.