Pharos Recognized for Office Print Security Expertise

Pharos was recently recognized for office print security expertise in Inc magazine and ReadWrite. The article in Inc is titled Too Much, Too Fast: How to Survive High-Speed Startup Growth, by author and CEO Rhett Power. He explores the challenges of rapid growth and how entrepreneurs can successfully navigate those challenges.

Keeping costs under control in such an environment can be difficult, and Power offers print management as an overlooked opportunity to reduce operating expenses.

“Things like employee lunch reimbursements or printing costs (remember all that paperwork?) can burn through cash fast. The latter is actually a surprisingly common pitfall a lot of growing startups face, according to Pharos Systems International, an enterprise print solutions provider. To keep costs in check, secure all devices across your organization and communicate the benefits of workflow efficiency to combat what CEO Kevin Pickhardt describes as ‘a cavalier attitude toward printers—a perception that office printing is free or close to it.’ His company has found that these measures can cut printing output (and the associated costs) by 40 percent.”

The article in ReadWrite is titled “The Biggest Hacking Risk? Your Employees,” by Editor-in-Chief Brad Anderson. Anderson emphasizes the importance of employee awareness and training in an evolving security landscape. He explores some areas of corporate security that tend to fly under the radar, including employee negligence, the importance of proactive ethical hacking, and overlooked network security vectors—including office printers:

“Consider something as seemingly innocuous as your printers. These can be easily hijacked and sent print jobs, such as when a hacker named ‘Weev’ was able to access public computers nationwide and print anti-Semitic literature. Kevin Pickhardt, CEO of enterprise print solutions provider Pharos Systems International, explains this danger: ‘Data-loss prevention solutions put a digital wrapper around a business, but paper can sometimes escape that wrapper. Office printers are not only potential sources of data loss and confidentiality issues, but attack vectors that hackers can exploit.’ Be sure to take precautions like secure pull-printing, in which employees can only retrieve their own print jobs with secure credentials.”

You can read the full text of these articles here:

>> Too Much, Too Fast: How to Survive High-Speed Startup Growth (Inc.)

>> The Biggest Hacking Risk? Your Employees (ReadWrite)