Securing printed document data is essential but with limited IT infrastructure, it can be a challenge – especially when your business has no print management. Company data should be protected at all costs. An entire new illegal industry is growing where criminals are trading private and confidential company and personal data.
Sometimes the criminals derive their revenue by holding companies to ransom or they have a market where they can sell valuable information. Probably the simplest form of this is rogue employees selling your client base to your competitor, complete with contact details, annual spend and products you supply to customers. It is a known fact that in most cases, for a data breach to take place, there needs to be an insider, either collecting data or giving access to your network to an external party. Criminals look for the most unprotected form of data access, and without correct print management, this could be their loophole.
With the tough times that most companies have gone through, many have put a hold on IT spend, unless it is an absolute necessity. By this, I mean that money is spent to ensure that your business operates and not to protect the business. The challenge is that both are as critical as the other.
If companies do consider investing in security, they would at least look at using existing, paid for IT infrastructure where possible to keep costs as low as possible, or migrating to some form of Cloud solution could make sense on a subscription model, with limited risk.
Increase Printed Document Security with Print Management
How do you secure your printed documents, without spending a fortune on IT infrastructure? The answer to this is to invest in print management solutions such as Printsol Flexiprint.
To show how FlexiPrint secures your data, here is an example. Our customer has 16 remote sites, with no permanent infrastructure. In fact, the customer is using LTE routers to connect these sites. There are various contractors on these sites, and they are all printing to the shared printers. There is no accountability, and the print jobs can’t be allocated to 3rd party accounts – a special requirement for these sites as cost disbursements are required. Without correct management and accountability down to user level, there is paper wastage and zero accountability as to who is printing which documents. This is a huge security risk to the company.
The heart of the FlexiPrint solution resides in Microsoft Azure and runs off an SQL database. This allows all administration to be managed centrally. With this customer, we added a FlexiPrint Mini Server to each site, which connected with the Azure database. This allowed onsite printers to be locked down. For documents to be released, users needed to be at the device and enter their unique PIN code. Each print job produced was recorded, and the customer could easily pull real-time reports showing the name of documents each user printed, along with date and time, which increases data security. As an additional security feature, every time a user prints the cost of the job was allocated to an account, allowing for full cost disbursement.
Whilst most of these features may sound familiar to print management solutions, the real value for the customer has come in the ease of installation. The solution has made better use of existing IT infrastructure by implementing a hybrid hosted solution. Each FlexiPrint Mini Server is preconfigured prior to installation, and future management of the sites is done via the Azure server.
In this particular case, Printsol manages, supports and does monthly health checks on the system. This ensures that the customer gets the value from their print management software. We guarantee this in the best way possible, as a subscription model that adds value. We also realise that most customers would be happy to manage their software post-installation and the architecture enables this.
It’s a fine balancing act between making investments in protecting your business and making investments that directly impact the products/services you offer. We believe that offering a subscription-based payment model that starts moving your print Infrastructure to the cloud makes it a little easier to make your printed documents secure.
To find out more about how our print management solutions enhance your document security, contact Printsol today.
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