Windows Protected Print (WPP): The Enterprise IT Guide to Preparing Before 2027

Executive Summary

For years, IT teams have been modernizing how their organizations work, moving to the cloud, locking down access, and simplifying infrastructure. Print has mostly been ignored through all of it. Which is ironic, because print is one of the messiest, most outdated corners of enterprise IT.

Microsoft just made it impossible to keep ignoring.

Windows Ready Print is Microsoft’s push to bring printing into the modern era: less complexity, fewer security risks, and a cleaner architecture that fits the way IT and cybersecurity actually work today—cloud-first, least-privilege access, Zero Trust. Windows Protected Print (WPP) is the operating system change that locks it down. If your team has ever wanted to make the case for fixing your print environment, that case just got a lot easier to make.

There’s a timeline attached. New third-party print drivers stopped being supported in 2025. IPP, the modern print standard, is being pushed throughout 2026. By 2027, WPP is expected to be the default setting—ensuring Windows Ready Print and IPP are the only accepted print path. That’s not far away.

This guide is for teams who want to get ahead of it, understand what’s changing, avoid the pitfalls, and come out the other side with a print environment that’s simpler, safer, and easier to manage.

The Security Problem with Traditional Printing

Print was designed in a different era.

When Windows printing was built, it was understandably given deep access to the operating system. Print drivers and spoolers needed to talk directly to hardware, manage network communication, and render documents consistently across hundreds of different devices. High-level system privileges were a practical solution at the time.

The problem is that model never really changed—but the world around it did.

Today, security teams build around principles like Zero Trust, least-privilege access, and application isolation. The idea is simple: no process should have more access than it absolutely needs. Traditional print drivers continue to violate that principle by their design. They run with elevated, often system-level privileges, and organizations typically have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of them installed from multiple manufacturers, each with its own risks and maintenance requirements.

In 2021, this gap caught up with everyone. The PrintNightmare vulnerability showed exactly how attackers could exploit the Windows print subsystem to gain elevated access across enterprise systems. Since 2021, Microsoft has disclosed more than 50 print spooler vulnerabilities. The print attack surface isn’t shrinking—it keeps producing new CVEs because the underlying architecture still gives printing more system access than it should have.

In 2024, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, sent a company-wide memo making security the organization’s defining priority: “If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security.” He was explicit that this meant deprioritizing new features and dropping support for legacy systems that couldn’t meet the bar. WPP is what that commitment looks like applied to printing. It’s Microsoft taking the same security-first lens they applied to identity, networking, and cloud infrastructure and turning it on one of the few remaining high-privilege holdouts in Windows. The result isn’t incremental improvement—it’s a rebuild from the ground up.

What is Windows Ready Print and Windows Protected Print (WPP)?

Windows Ready Print is Microsoft’s modernized print architecture for how printing works in Windows. Windows Ready Print replaces the old driver-based model with a cleaner, more secure approach built around the Internet Printing Protocol (“IPP”) standard.

Under the traditional model, every printer manufacturer ships its own driver, and that driver runs with elevated privileges inside the operating system—hundreds of different drivers, each with its own behavior, its own update cycle, and its own potential vulnerabilities. Windows Ready Print eliminates that. Instead of each printer having its own software living inside Windows, the OS manages the print process directly through IPP, a modern, standardized communication layer.

Windows Protected Print ensures that the new model of printing is the only model of printing. When enabled, users can only enable printers using Windows Ready Print.

WPP introduces several major system changes:

• Traditional third-party print drivers are removed
• Printing standardizes around IPP
• Legacy spoolers and print queues are replaced
• Printing becomes more aligned with Zero Trust security models
• The operating system gains greater control over the print process

Other operating systems have already implemented this change, including Apple, Linux, ChromeOS, iOS, and Android. Users do not load drivers on their mobile phones in order to print. Windows is now catching up with that model.

Although WPP is currently optional, Microsoft is steadily moving toward making it the default. This transition is already underway. Organizations adopting Arm-based Windows devices are beginning to encounter compatibility challenges tied to modern IPP-based architectures.

What Printing Infrastructure Changes with WPP?

This is important to understand upfront: enabling WPP is a one-way door. Disabling it after the fact doesn’t restore your previous configuration—drivers, queues, and connections that are deleted are gone. That makes it critical to understand exactly what changes technically, and what the downstream impact of each change will be before you flip the switch.

WPP removes traditional third-party drivers. Printer connections dependent on those drivers disappear. Users lose access to printers they’ve relied on for years, often without a clear error message explaining why.

WPP replaces vendor-specific driver functionality with Windows Ready Print and IPP. Advanced features like stapling, tray selection, finishing options, and color profiles are no longer controlled by the OEM driver; they depend on two things: how many of those features are covered by the IPP standard, and how deeply the printer manufacturer has embraced Windows Ready Print architectures. Both vary significantly across devices and manufacturers, meaning feature availability after migration isn’t always predictable until it’s tested.

WPP changes how print jobs reach printers. With IPP, jobs travel directly from the client to the printer over HTTP, preferably encrypted—the print server is no longer the bus station where every job stops, transfers, and gets routed. Instead, it shifts to something closer to an online booking and ticketing system: managing routes, enforcing policies, and tracking usage, while the job travels point-to-point on its own.

WPP risks breaking connections with enterprise applications. ERP systems, EMR platforms, and line-of-business apps that print as part of a workflow often reference specific drivers or queue names. When those are gone, the workflow breaks—sometimes silently.

What are the Biggest Challenges of WPP?

Many organizations do not fully understand their print environments.

They may not know:

• How many printers are deployed
• Which drivers are in use
• Which workflows depend on printing
• Which devices are IPP-ready and which are too old to make the journey.

You can’t manage what you can’t see. Without visibility, modernization becomes difficult at best.

Legacy Hardware Constraints

Printers often remain in production for many years. This can result in some legacy devices not fully supporting IPP standards. Organizations may need to refresh fleet timelines or alternative deployment strategies when planning what to do with older devices.

Complex Workflows

Printing is deeply embedded into enterprise operations. Beyond simple desktop printing, many advanced print workflow capabilities have historically relied on vendor-specific drivers, including:

• Stapling
• Tray selection
• Advanced color management
• Mixed orientation jobs
• Specialized finishing.

Organizations will need to validate these workflows carefully

Organizational Coordination

The technical changes are one part of the story. WPP touches more teams and more workflows than most organizations realize when they start simple planning.

IT infrastructure teams carry a big part of the lift in the transition. Changing to IPP over HTTP takes planning. Printers may need to be configured differently, and print infrastructure will most likely need to be rebuilt, or new print management systems that support WPP may need to be tested and deployed. For teams already stretched thin, this needs to be scoped and resourced as a true project, not a side task.

Help desks need to trained and alerted. When printers disappear, or printing functionality is limited, workers call the helpdesk. Without preparation and clear communication, support ticket volumes can spike and user acceptance can wane.

Security teams need a seat at the table. Involving security in planning, rather than after the fact, ensures the migration actually delivers on its promise and aligns with broader Zero Trust efforts already underway.

End users will notice. Lost printer connections, changed workflows, and missing features are visible disruptions to the people who need to print. Communication and change management aren’t optional; they’re what separates a smooth rollout from a chaotic one.

Successful transitions require cross-functional planning and communication.

The Timeline Organizations Need to Know

Microsoft has been diligent about this transition, modeling it like other core operating system changes. Milestones are in motion—and the planning window is narrowing.

Organizations that haven’t started planning are already reaching an uncomfortable part of this adoption curve. The milestones between now and July 2027 aren’t a grace period—they’re the deprecation and migration window.

How to Prepare for the Transition

1. Make Print Visible

Most organizations know less about their print environment than they realize. They can tell you about users, workstations, and applications, but ask them how many printers are active on the network, which drivers are in use, or which line-of-business applications print as part of a workflow—and the answers get uncertain fast. This gap is the first problem to solve.

You cannot modernize what you cannot see.

2. Pilot Windows Ready Print Early

IPP, the basis of Windows Ready Print, is not a future capability; it is available today, and organizations that start using it now will be in a fundamentally better position when the WPP transition becomes mandatory.

Introducing IPP early provides necessary learning. Pick a department or a manageable subset of printers and move them to IPP-based printing. This does not require enabling WPP, only configuring the endpoints and the queues.

Observe what happens:

• Which devices work seamlessly out of the box?
• How do users react? Do they notice?
• What print features and workflows are impacted?

These are questions you will want to understand as you prepare for full rollout.

Organizations that pilot small and learn early can migrate with more confidence and be better prepared than those that discover gaps under the pressure of an accelerated transition.

3. Adopt a Modern Print Management Strategy

Modern print management does more than keep printers running. It gives you visibility into who is printing, what they’re printing on, and how your environment is changing over time—the foundation you need before anything else in this transition can happen.

It also makes early pilots possible. When users, drivers, queues, and printers are managed in a single system, you can move a department or a subset of devices to IPP without rebuilding your management process from scratch. That makes step two, introducing IPP early, much easier to execute in practice.

Modern, cloud-based print management systems, like Pharos Cloud, are built to be compatible with Windows Ready Print and WPP. Implementing one now provides the technical foundation for migration, so you can transition at your pace, knowing that the steps you take now are taking you in the right direction.

4. Align Printing with a Security Strategy

WPP is, at its core, a security initiative. Microsoft is not making this change because IPP is a nicer protocol; they are making it because the traditional print architecture is a persistent security liability, and WPP is how they close it.

That means security teams should not be an afterthought in planning. They should be involved from the start in decisions about how print traffic will be monitored, how deployments will be managed and approved, and how printing is treated in the security model going forward.

For organizations that are already implementing Zero Trust initiatives, the WPP transition is a natural fit with their efforts. Regardless, print belongs as a part of the existing security program. Microsoft is simply reinforcing that reality.

5. Treat This as Change Management

Most technical transitions fail at the human layer more than the technical one. Printing is a change that impacts every user, every department, and many workflows.

Printing is not seen as a strategic resource until it breaks.

WPP implementation is a change that risks breaking print workflows, or at a minimum changing users interactions with printers and printing. While often minor, users will see a difference.

Preparing end users for the change, along with infrastructure teams, managed print service providers, desktop and end-user services, and helpdesk operators will be critical to whether the organization embraces a change or fights it. If they find out by discovering a problem themselves, entire migrations can be brought to a halt.

Communication, executive buy-in, and thorough testing are not nice-to-haves. They are what will separate a smooth rollout from chaos.

The Bigger Opportunity: Rethinking Print Operations

Most conversations regarding WPP focus on what changes and what breaks. That is a very important consideration and good place to start. But there’s a deeper question beyond that: what does your print environment look like if you get this right?

Improved Security

For years, print has been one of the largest under-addressed attack surfaces in enterprise IT—elevated-privilege drivers, an opaque spooler, third-party code running on every Windows workstation that prints. WPP largely closes that surface. Removing the threat is a real security win, not just a compatibility and compliance initiative.

Reduced Complexity

Driver sprawl is an operational burden with hundreds of vendor-specific drivers, each requiring testing, its own update cycle, and security patching. Print servers similarly require management, penetration testing, patches and updates, scaling, and disaster recovery planning. Complexity has been accumulating across the organization for years. Standardizing on Windows Ready Print and IPP means fewer drivers, fewer queues, fewer per device exceptions to maintain, and the opportunity to have fewer moving parts in your print system. The management overhead reduction is real and the IT time saved is invaluable.

Better Cloud Alignment

The legacy print model was built for on-premises infrastructure. Print servers, driver repositories, local spoolers … none of it was designed for modern cloud-managed services. IPP-based printing is. Print jobs travel point-to-point over standard HTTP, or encrypted HTTPS. This means management can live in the cloud. The result is a print environment that fits naturally into the modern IT architecture most organizations are already building.

Reduced Dependence on Print Servers

On-premises print servers are costly. Hardware, licensing, patching, failover, storage and day-to-day management all add up to IT resources. For many organizations, Windows Ready Print and WPP offer an opportunity to question whether print servers need to exist at all in a modern print stack. Moving to a modern, cloud-managed architecture can eliminate that server footprint, providing meaningful cost savings. And that opens the opportunity to look at contracting print infrastructure as a service, saving something more important to IT than money… time.

Alignment with PrintOps

WPP is a catalyst for delivering modernization in printing infrastructure. It is also an opportunity to rethink print operations within the enterprise. The opportunity is bigger than WPP. Organizations that get this right aren’t just updating their print process, they’re moving from print management to PrintOps: a modern, cloud-native approach that treats printing as a managed enterprise service rather than legacy infrastructure. Any change is an opportunity to solve the biggest problem you can. WPP is change; PrintOps is the bigger solution.

How Pharos Can Help

Pharos has been innovating enterprise print solutions for more than 30 years and building modern IPP-based and cloud-ready print architectures for the last 12 years. We understand the real complexity of enterprise print environments, legacy printers, accumulated drivers, and undocumented workflows, and we have a practical path for guiding clients through it.

Pharos has enterprise experience in each of the recommended steps for transition, beginning with visibility: understanding what you have, how it’s used, and where the risk and gaps are to be found.

The Pharos Cloud platform is Windows Ready Print/WPP-ready and compliant today. We can guide organizations through piloting and deployment of IPP throughout the enterprise. What’s even better is that Pharos manages the entire cloud infrastructure, including 24×7 operational monitoring, system updates, and real-time status monitoring. With our platform, traditional print drivers and IPP-based printing can co-exist, so the transition can happen on a timeline that works.

We also help organizations connect print to the broader IT infrastructure and security strategies already underway: Zero Trust, cloud management, IT asset management, observability, and policy deployed access. WPP isn’t just a print project; it is an opportunity to modernize one of the last major legacy subsystems in Windows. We’d like to help you make the most of the opportunity.

Final Thoughts

Windows Ready Print is here. WPP is coming, and it is inevitable. Microsoft has built print modernization directly into the OS and made clear that the future of enterprise printing will look fundamentally different from the driver-heavy architectures organizations rely on today.

The organizations that prepare early will have the time to understand their environment, identify gaps, and work through the transition on their own schedule. They will get to pilot in a controlled way and fix problems before they become firestorms. Those that wait will be doing all of this under the pressure of change.

While Microsoft is not deprecating print drivers yet, the holes and stress points will begin to show, as they are in Arm workstations and newly introduced printers.

Print has been easy to ignore. It mostly works and is familiar to the point of near invisibility. WPP changes the equation. It’s a mandatory modernization under the umbrella of security. But it is also an opportunity to clean up what has accumulated over many years.

The time to start is now.