Enhance Security with the August Beacon Release

Pharos’ cloud-based Beacon print management platform is designed to reduce your IT infrastructure and printing costs by moving your print infrastructure to the cloud, securing the end-to-end printing process, and providing the clarity and insights needed to determine the best print strategy for your organization. The latest Beacon release brings several new features that enhance security and improve both user and administrative experience. 

Enhancing Security 

• Single Sign-on: The Beacon web management console now supports Single Sign-on (SSO) enabling system users to log in to Beacon using their existing credentials from major identity providers. This will improve users’ experiences and reduce IT costs by eliminating the responsibility of storing and managing user credentials. Beacon supports any SAML-based and OpenID Connect identity providers including Google, Office 365, AppleConnect, Auth0, and Okta. 
• Open ID / Passcode Authentication: Passcode authentication provides an alternative way for end users to authenticate at printers and release documents if their ID card is lost, damaged, or unavailable. In this release, passcode authentication is now supported on Canon and Lexmark devices in addition to HP and Konica Minolta devices.  
• Second-swipe logout: In addition to our existing touchless printing workflows, users can reduce the chance that sensitive information gets into the wrong hands by tapping their ID proximity card/badge to log out. Instead of waiting for the inactivity timer or touching the printer’s user interface, Users can now simply swipe their card again to immediately log out of the printer session. 
• FIPS 140-2 support (Coming early September): Beacon now supports the US Government’s FIPS-140-2 standard for cryptography issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

Improving user experience 

• Guest Printing: Guest Printing provides flexibility by allowing non-employees such as visitors and contractors to print documents without requiring a user account in your directory system. Guest Print has been optimized to work on mobile devices, and Users can now easily use the Guest Printing portal on a mobile device with a minimum amount of resizing, panning, and scrolling to print PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and Text file on A4/Letter-size media.  
• Authentication to Home: This new setting on Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, and Ricoh devices allows administrators to display the Device Home screen and device features upon authentication instead of the Pharos default screen for printers with heavy copy or scanning use. 

To learn more about the latest Beacon release, read the full release notes.