TL;DR
Print management brings visibility and control to how printing is used across an organization. The same IT trends toward stronger security and cloud migration are pushing Microsoft to redesign how printing works, and pushing enterprises toward the cloud platforms that open the door for what comes next: PrintOps, a cloud-native model that runs printing with the same discipline as any other critical IT service.
Introduction
The first two posts in this series covered how printing works and why traditional environments create so much pain. This final post turns to what comes next.
What does print management actually do in practice? How does secure pull printing change the way people work? Where do managed print services fit in, and why is Microsoft even rethinking how printing is built? By the end, we’ll land on where all of this is heading: PrintOps.
What Print Management Really Does
Print management is the practice of controlling and optimizing how printing happens across an organization. It isn’t only about the devices—it’s about the people, documents, workflows, and policies behind them. After all, devices don’t print, people do.
A strong print management approach solves a consistent set of key printing challenges:
- Who is allowed to print, and where
- What print policy is set as default, and what’s enforced, such as duplex or color
- The secure and encrypted flow of documents from desktop to printer
- Monitoring and reporting on print usage by person, document, and print device
Get these elements right, and the result is a significant improvement in costs, a reduction in paper waste, stronger security and compliance, simpler operations, and a reduced environmental footprint.
Print management first gained traction in universities, which needed a way to control and recover the cost of unrestricted student printing. Pharos pioneered this solution in 1992, but the same value was later recognized and adopted by leading enterprises looking for the same benefits: control, visibility, and accountability.
How a Print Management Platform Works
In practice, a modern print management platform sits between users and printers, watching, enforcing, and reporting on everything that happens in between.
The platform tracks each print file, who printed it, and its details—time, page count, color or black-and-white—and consolidates that information into an analytics engine that provides the management information required to not only monitor, but to optimize a print fleet and the user policies governing how printers are used. Advanced platforms also discover printer fleets and can monitor device status for things like low toner, paper outages, and device faults.
A print management platform goes beyond monitoring, enabling control of the print flow. This control breaks down into policy enforcement at the moment of print submission, and into whether printing will be direct or secured for later release.
Direct Print vs Secure Pull Printing
One of the clearest illustrations of what print management changes is the difference between direct print and secure pull printing.
Direct print is the traditional pattern: pick a printer, hit ‘Print’, and the job goes straight to that device. The obvious problem is timing; the page often finishes printing before anyone arrives to collect it, and in the meantime, it just sits in the tray. Sensitive information is exposed to whoever happens to walk by, and no small number of those jobs are ever collected at all.
Secure pull printing breaks that pattern by holding the job until someone claims it. A user prints to a secure, virtual queue instead of a specific device, the job waits in encrypted form, and the user releases it only after authenticating at whichever printer is convenient—a badge tap, a QR code, a PIN. Nothing prints until the right person is standing there.
That one change does a lot: documents are no longer exposed the moment they’re sent, users can release a job at any authorized device rather than the one they originally picked, and waste drops because jobs nobody claims simply expire instead of printing anyway. It’s no surprise secure pull printing has become close to a default expectation in banks, universities, and large enterprises.
Direct print still has a place in plenty of businesses—a bank teller printing a receipt on the spot, a warehouse worker printing a pick order, a hospital nursing station with a shared printer down the hall. Speed and immediacy matter more than a release step in those moments. Even there, though, a print management platform doesn’t step aside: it still tracks, encrypts, and delivers those documents securely to the device they’re intended for.
Managed Print Services vs Print Management
It’s easy to confuse managed print services (MPS) with print management, but they solve different problems.
MPS is generally delivered by a printer manufacturer or a service provider, and it’s focused on the hardware: designing the fleet, deploying devices, keeping them stocked with supplies, dispatching a technician when something breaks. It’s a way to outsource the physical care and feeding of the printers themselves.
Print management is about how printing is used, not the boxes doing the printing. It decides who can print and where, enforces the policies that reduce waste and protect information, powers secure workflows like pull printing, and supplies the data to keep improving all of it.
The two often coexist, which is exactly why they get confused. An organization can have a beautifully optimized fleet under an MPS contract and still have zero visibility into who’s printing what—or have excellent print management running on a fleet nobody’s optimized in years. One optimizes the environment. The other governs it. A well-run print environment needs both.
A Simple Analogy
The distinction can be easily compared to the experience at an airport. Managed print services are like the maintenance crews keeping the planes fueled, inspected, and ready to fly. Print management is like the gate staff checking that passengers have valid tickets, confirming they’re authorized to board, and making sure nobody’s carrying more than they should.
Both roles matter, and neither one does the other’s job. A perfectly maintained plane doesn’t check tickets, and a strict gate agent won’t catch a mechanical failure. Real maturity means having both in place—well-run hardware and well-governed access—not choosing one over the other.
Why Printing Is Changing Now
The future of printing is changing in two material ways, driven by global IT trends of improving security architectures and modernizing enterprise services through the cloud. Legacy printing architectures are inconsistent with modern security practice and are not designed for cloud-native operation. That is changing.
Windows Ready Print, rolling out now, is Microsoft’s modernized, IPP-based standard for how Windows discovers and connects to printers. Today’s manufacturer-specific drivers, installers, print queues, and print delivery mechanisms are not compatible with Microsoft’s direction. They all need to change. Windows Protected Print is the enforcement side, and will eventually become the default configuration that blocks third-party print drivers outright, closing off the current architectural vulnerability that made incidents like PrintNightmare possible.
Coincident with the Microsoft changes in the Windows OS, enterprise IT is more broadly shifting infrastructure to the cloud. Data centers, applications, and identity management have all been migrating to the cloud for years, and print is simply catching up. Print servers are giving way to cloud-hosted queues, and driver deployment is being replaced with centralized, configurable cloud driver management. Analytics is being expanded to include telemetry monitoring of the print flow itself, in addition to the print output.
Print is not leading this charge; it is following. Open enterprise cloud platforms are defining the direction, and cloud print management needs to meet the evolving standard.
Coming from Microsoft and from IT’s own modernization roadmap, the print infrastructure shift is toward centralized, policy-driven, driver-light, cloud-based printing.
From Print Management to PrintOps
All these changes are defining a new market space that goes beyond MPS and print management. Whereas print management governs print, enterprises are looking to modernize the management of print itself—and ideally work with suppliers who can solve bigger problems for them, taking on more of the load.
Pharos has termed this space print operations, or PrintOps: the integrated, cloud-native, user-centric approach to managing print infrastructure and operations, unifying automated workflows, AI-powered insights, enterprise-grade security, and seamless access for today’s hybrid workforce.
To return to our analogy of the airport, managed print services are the maintenance crews, and print management is the gate staff. PrintOps is Air Traffic Control and TSA combined watching every flight, coordinating the full system, and keeping the entire operation safe and moving end to end, not just one gate or one plane.
Where print management answers who can print and where, PrintOps asks how printing behaves day to day, and how it changes safely as the organization does. It treats printing the way mature IT teams already treat every other critical service: designed for cloud, observed continuously around the clock as a critical IT infrastructure component, and continuously, incrementally improved—not a static system IT tolerates until it breaks.
PrintOps runs as you would expect: a cloud-based control plane, integrated with existing identity management, providing open API print visibility, and supporting end users the way they work—keeping print jobs local when available and leveraging cloud-shared architectures when required.
The future of printing is secure, cloud-based, simpler, and more flexible than what enterprises have been living with for decades. And that future is available today. That is the future Pharos delivers with Pharos Cloud.
Bringing It All Together
The past three posts have covered a lot of ground from how print works, to the issues enterprises face, to the future of printing which is emerging today. Printing itself hasn’t gone anywhere, and for plenty of organizations, it isn’t going anywhere soon. Underneath that simple click, though, sits a chain of drivers, queues, and servers that was built for a much smaller and more stable era. Legacy printing strains, and often breaks, the moment it stretches across a true enterprise. Print’s inefficiency creates excess costs, burdens critical support resources, and exposes security vulnerabilities that show up across the organization, not as a single line item.
Print management puts visibility and control into the system, recognizing that people, not printers, are the force that drives it. Microsoft’s shift is a clear signal that legacy vulnerabilities must be addressed.
PrintOps is the direction out of the printing morass. Identity-centric, secure, observable, scalable, elastic, open. We don’t need to envision the future of printing—all we must do is look at effective, modern IT systems today. Printing should, and must, become one of them.
