Print Assessment Results

Welcome to the Print Environment Self-Assessment Results page.

This assessment was designed to help you evaluate the current state of your organization’s print infrastructure and identify areas for improvement.

The results of this assessment will provide valuable insights into the efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness of your print environment, and will help guide you in the development of a comprehensive print management strategy.

We hope that this report will be a valuable resource for the IT team and other stakeholders in the organization as you work to optimize your print environment.

IT Productivity

Print is a fundamental dial tone service that employees need and expect to work.

However, for large enterprises, managing a multi-vendor print fleet and print infrastructure is often a complex and time-consuming task for their already strained IT staff.

To help alleviate burden on IT staff and help drive productivity, forward-thinking organizations are:

Migrating print infrastructure to the cloud as core part of their digital transformation efforts.

• Moving print infrastructure to the cloud can eliminate much of the ongoing maintenance costs – like managing servers and print drivers, for example – and centralizes print management to increase operational efficiency and drive down costs.
• Well-designed cloud platforms also offer the scalability to adjust to evolving organizational needs, the flexibility to add new devices or capabilities as your needs change, as well as provide the high-availability required by large enterprises.

Centrally managing print operations.

• Modern print management platforms enable an organization’s IT staff to manage and control their enterprise-wide print environment behind a single pane of glass via a web browser
• It also helps you automatically discover and auto-populate new printers discovered on the network, proactively monitor device health and supplies so staff can stay informed on device health, and run a more efficient fleet.

Taking an approach of user-self-service.

• Modern print management platforms reduce the burden on IT by enabling users to discover and add printers on their own, even without administrative access to their workstations
• You can also allow designated users to invite guests/contractors to print, and conveniently print from their mobile devices.

Leveraging universal print drivers.

• Managing vendor print drivers and print queues can be a time consuming hassle for IT staff, particularly if the organization has a large multi-vendor fleet. A Universal print driver supports thousands of printer models, from low-volume, single function printers to high-volume, multifunction devices across all manufacturers
• This requires only a fraction of the administrative overhead of traditional driver management. In addition, universal drivers provide a common user interface and print experience, even across different printer manufacturers to simplify the user experience, reduce training requirements, and reduce troubleshooting vectors for the Help Desk.

Security and Compliance

Changing work styles and behaviors, along with the accelerated shift to remote work in recent years has created new security vulnerabilities for enterprises.

At the same time, print vulnerabilities took center stage recently with the print spooler vulnerabilities that became widely known as PrintNightmare.

With hackers viewing office print devices as IoT devices connected to a corporate network, and with employees continuing to print and work from anywhere, forward-thinking organizations are increasingly viewing print as a critical part of their organization’s overall security initiatives.

Here are steps you can take to improve print security and compliance:

Support zero trust security practices

• The security strategy of zero trust has grown in popularity and is emerging as the new standard for corporate security and infrastructure.
• More corporate enterprises are rethinking traditional strategies that rely on perimeter security that could allow malicious payloads to propagate across the network unhindered once they’ve breached the network.

Enhance document security with secure print workflows.

• To prevent sensitive information from being left unattended and potentially getting into the wrong hands, organizations increasingly rely on secure release workflows that require authentication at a print device in order to release the submitted print jobs.
• Not only does this workflow enhance security, it also reduces waste and improves user convenience with the ability to print to a single queue and release at any device that’s convenient.

Migrate print infrastructure to the cloud.

• Well-designed cloud platforms enhance the security of print operations by eliminating as a potential attack vector on-premises print servers that require ongoing patching and maintenance, and by securing the entire print path with end-to-end encryption.

Comply with local data privacy requirements.

• Amidst the increasing number of data privacy requirements around the world that provide rules on how personal data can be stored and used, companies are taking proactive steps to ensure they are securing personal data and adhering to local data privacy and data sovereignty requirements around the globe, or otherwise face significant fines.

Cost Reduction

It’s not uncommon for an organization to misunderstand real cost of their organization’s printing habits.

For organizations that take a decentralized approach to print, and have departments purchasing their own printers as they see fit, it’s an even greater challenge as IT staff may not be aware of all the print devices out there.

With the shift to remote work, it has become even more difficult to know and control what employees are printing at home. Meanwhile, print devices may be sitting idly and underutilized back at the office.

To help control and reduce enterprise-wide printing costs, forward-thinking organizations are:

Reviewing industry benchmarks with their Managed Print Services provider.

• Understanding how you’re performing compared others in your industry can provide valuable insights on how your print operations can be optimized.

Centralizing procurement and print operations.

• Effective organizations centralize the procurement of print devices and standardize on certain models.
• Centralizing the management of print also provides visibility into all the print devices on the network (as well as locally attached, personal printers) and helps achieve economies of scale from a Help Desk support perspective.

Using analytics to optimize print and reduce costs.

• Long spreadsheets full of data can be immobilizing. Comprehensive print analytics on-demand can provide quick access to key metrics to identify how and where print is being created and identify cost outliers.
• These insights and analytics help drive your go-forward print strategy, set and track goals, and make informed decisions to reduce costs and limit environmental impact.

Developing and enforcing print guidelines.

• Even though print is oftentimes one of the largest unmanaged costs for an organization, many employees don’t realize how expensive printing can be. Print policies can help keep printing costs in check.
• There’s a good chance your company already has policies around what employees are allowed to print. Now is the time to review those policies and make sure they still apply.
• Whether you create hard rules about what documents can be printed (e.g. not allowing emails to be printed in color), or set up notifications that educate employees on more mindful printing habits (e.g. recommend printing 2-sided), these policies can be easily managed and enforced through print management software.

Reducing the number of locally attached print devices.

• Locally-attached personal printers cost significantly more per page than workgroup printers and MFPs.
• Print cartridges are often purchased one at a time, eliminating the opportunity for bulk discounts, and multiple personal printers typically means many different makes and models, providing no economies of scale from a procurement or Help Desk support perspective.

Migrating print to cloud.

• Not only does moving print infrastructure to the cloud help eliminate the need for costly print servers, it also eliminates the ongoing costs associated with maintenance, electricity, physical/data security costs, etc., associated with maintaining physical infrastructure.

End-User Enablement

It’s safe to say that flexible work arrangements are here to stay, and how employees work has evolved.

Employees work outside the office, on their own devices, at all hours of the day, and working alongside with contractors and outsourced teams.

Print is a utility and must be available and simple whenever it’s needed.

Employees need to be able to print regardless of location, the network they’re on, or platform they’re using in order to remain productive.

Providing an intuitive and seamless print experience for employees and contractors, wherever they work, is important to for companies to remain productive.

In response, many forward-thinking organizations are:

Migrating print infrastructure to the cloud.

• Adopting a print-from-anywhere model is a must for organizations with a remote, hybrid, or mobile workforce.
• Whether printing at home on personal printers, from a public network while on the road, or in the office, leveraging a cloud-based print management platform is critical to support the transition and enable a seamless, secure, and intuitive print experience wherever employees work.

Enabling print from mobile devices.

• The proliferation of mobile devices has changed the way people do things. Today, many companies have BYOD policies enabling employees to carry out their activities from any network using a myriad of devices to enhance employee convenience and productivity.

Focusing on a seamless employee print experience.

• Providing employees with a consistent and simple experience where they can add personal printers without administrative access to their workstations, submit print jobs from any network and release them without the hassle of mapping to the right printer, or quickly digitizing and sharing documents helps employees remain satisfied and productive.

Integrate print workflows into their document management solution.

• Organizations are increasingly automating previously manual-intensive paper processes by digitizing documents and integrating directly with document management systems to drive productivity by automating workflows and improving collaboration.

Sustainability

Enterprises that incorporate sustainability initiatives into their business plans not only help the environment, these practices end up helping their P&L as well. Adding print into these initiatives is a much small step if your company already has sustainability on its radar.

Reducing wasted paper, limiting excess printing and the associated energy costs, and taking a mindful approach to print create an overall reduction in print – leading to fewer resources consumed, and fewer resources purchased.

It really is a win-win-win.