TL;DR
Traditional, server-based print environments quietly rack up costs and risk. Print servers, driver chaos, fragmented visibility, and documents nobody ever picks up all create real pain—for IT, for end users, and for security teams.
Introduction
The first post in this series covered the basics of how printing works. This one gets into what happens once a lot of people and a lot of devices are involved.
Once there are hundreds or thousands of users, printing stops being a matter of hitting ‘Print’ and starts being both an infrastructure problem and a support problem. That’s where print servers, driver management, and a long list of hidden issues show up.
Scaling and Infrastructure
As enterprises scale their printing environment, directly connecting end-user workstations to printers creates unmanageable complexity at the printer, desktop, and network level. Instead, print servers are added to consolidate queues, drivers, and print job routing rather than pushing that all to the workstation level. Over time, however, print server-based architectures have become outdated and burdensome.
Each printer manufacturer ships their own drivers, often different versions for different printer families, different operating systems, and even different print languages. Security and feature updates require infrastructure teams to routinely patch servers. Enterprise high-availability and disaster recovery can also mean duplicating infrastructure investment and maintenance.
At scale, enterprise printing becomes expensive in dollars and time. While printing is not entirely unique in leveraging data centers and servers, most other server-heavy applications have already been migrated to cloud services. But enterprise print largely remains on-premises in its hub-and-spoke architecture.
End Users and Support
Printing has long been a source of end-user dissatisfaction. You can still find places around the country where frustrated workers can pay to take a sledgehammer to a printer. The reality is that proprietary drivers, integrated deep into operating systems, coupled with aging servers and printers means that printing is both unreliable and opaque.
Helpdesk operators, the place where end users go when troubles arise, are generally flying blind. They often don’t know a printer has an error code until an end user tells them. Turn it off and then on. Retry the print request. Send a technician. These are the traditional steps of triage and fix. Archaic by today’s standards.
One enterprise we worked with had IT workers arrive before regular office staff every day to walk the halls of their 15-story headquarters to manually check if printers were operational. This is not modern IT practice.
Governance Concerns
No single group seems to own printing end-to-end. This often raises issues impacting multiple areas of governance:
- Printing often sits outside of security teams’ architecture and testing.
- Asset management rarely has an accurate list of printers in use let alone how much they are used and who is using them.
- Paper documents bypass typical Data Loss Prevention (“DLP”) systems, and sensitive information can often be found sitting open in the printer output tray.
These issues create problems of security, compliance, and waste as printing scales to enterprises.
Microsoft themselves are taking direct action to address the security vulnerabilities with legacy printing infrastructure—introducing Windows Ready Print as their modernized IPP standard for future operating systems and Windows Protected Print as their enforcement switch in the operating system. Both of these changes are specifically targeted to redesign a vulnerable part of their operating system.
While these problems exist at organizations large and small, scale complexities increase risk exponentially. Even with increased risk and cost, enterprises are seeking to reduce the amount of IT time spent on core infrastructure like printing.
The Global Insurer
One real example helps make this reality concrete. A large global insurance company had grown through years of expansion and acquisition, and its print environment showed it: different business units and regions had each made their own calls on vendors, support models, device types, and contracts, with no one coordinating across them.
By the time anyone added it up, the company was running more than 600 print servers worldwide. Traveling employees couldn’t reliably find the right printer or driver at a different office. IT spent a disproportionate amount of time just keeping the basics working. Leadership knew printing was expensive, but there was no single source of truth for spend or usage—just a patchwork nobody could see across.
The fix came from adopting a modern print management platform and moving to a cloud-centric architecture: eliminating hundreds of print servers, introducing secure pull printing that requires authentication at the device, applying consistent policy across every region, and finally collecting real data on how printing was actually being used.
The result, over time, was more than $100 million in cumulative savings—plus less support burden and meaningfully stronger security.
In Today’s IT World, We Don’t Need to Settle for Any of These Issues
Infrastructure strain, support overload, and governance gaps are what happens when a system built for a much smaller, simpler era gets stretched to enterprise scale without anyone rethinking the model underneath it. The next post in this series gets into what a modern print management approach actually looks like—and how secure pull printing and cloud-based control change the math.
