A New Era of Secure Pull Printing

Every Pharos customer for the past twenty-five years has agreed on one thing: they want to make printing more efficient, more secure, and more user-friendly. The single best action an organization can take to accomplish these goals is to change their printing workflow from push (printing directly to specific devices) to pull printing, where people print to a secure queue and then release or “pull” their documents at any device on the network.

For many years, secure pull printing technology has proven to be a critical component of corporate security strategy and efforts to reduce costs and waste. Beyond security, few technologies offer as fast and demonstrable a financial return as secure pull printing—especially in large, print-intensive organizations, where positive ROI can be achieved within six months. As a result, Managed Print Services (MPS) providers collectively identify secure pull printing as the single most requested print solution in their portfolio.

Pharos has been a leader and innovator in secure pull printing since we first deployed it 25 years ago at Auckland University in New Zealand. The spirit of innovation that enabled us to introduce Uniprint, our pay-for-print solution for higher education institutions, continues to drive us forward today.

Today we are pleased to announce Sentry Print Services, a cloud-based pull printing solution and the fastest path to making your organization’s printing more secure, cost-effective, and sustainable. Sentry Print Services is delivered on our award-winning Beacon cloud platform, which already serves thousands of organizations around the world.

With the ever-evolving threats emerging on the Internet, security has rapidly become a primary business concern of every organization. CIOs are becoming increasingly aware of how important it is to secure their office print environment, as it represents arguably the least monitored business process throughout the enterprise.

Until now, a comprehensively audited and secure print environment has only been within the reach of dedicated print infrastructure managers or as a component of a complex MPS contract.

Sentry Print Services dramatically reduces the complexity and cost to deploy and manage secure print solutions. What has been a multi-day (or often longer) installation process that includes server provisioning, infrastructure design, high availability planning, internal departmental coordination, and on-premises solution installation and testing, can now be reduced to minutes when delivered as a print service on the Pharos Beacon cloud platform.

With Sentry Print Services, business leaders and IT managers who are looking to move more of their IT operations to the cloud can now secure their print environment quickly, eliminate print servers, and minimize print queues and drivers.

The Sentry service works with practically all business printers and provides employees with more convenient and flexible printing workflows. People print as they normally do, but their print jobs are held in a secure queue until they walk up to their preferred network printer to authenticate. To release (print) their documents, they can use a proximity card, their network credentials, or even their mobile device. This secure workflow significantly reduces risk, unnecessary printing, abandoned prints, paper and toner waste, and costs.

With these benefits plus a straightforward deployment, it’s easy to see why printing has joined the “Everything-as-a-Service” cloud revolution, which is allowing companies to focus on what matters most to their business while outsourcing the rest to experts like Pharos who can do it better, faster and cheaper.

When you pair Sentry Print Services with Beacon Analytics, you have a comprehensive and dynamic print management solution that provides key insights into your printer fleet, employee printing activity and related costs, and opportunities to continually save and optimize.

Going forward, we will continue to expand the print services we provide on the Beacon cloud platform, to create even more value and enable our customers to concentrate on what they do best – while we concentrate on what we do best.