Global Insurance Company

$100M in Print Cost Savings—and Growing

Since 2011, this global insurance company has saved more than $100 million by modernizing and optimizing its print environment with Pharos. What began with Pharos Blueprint, an on-premise print management platform, has now evolved into a full cloud-native print infrastructure powered by Pharos Cloud, complete with analytics from Pharos Insights.

• Industry: Insurance
• Employees: 40,000
• Annual Revenue: $50 Billion
• Location: Global

Challenge

In 2011, the state of printing at this global insurance giant was typical of many large enterprises; no centralized management, with departments and business units responsible for making their own decisions on printers and printing.

As a result, there was little visibility into the total costs related to printing or the security risks associated with unmanaged output and infrastructure. There were no company policies around office printing, and sensitive documents were often exposed and forgotten at the printer.

IT teams struggled to manage hundreds of print servers, and employees found it difficult to find the correct print drivers and print queues, putting pressure on the Help Desk. Costs were out of control with no way to take advantage of economies of scale, information security risk was elevated, and the entire system was overly complex to manage.

Solution

The company began its transformation by centralizing all print-related decisions and securing every device across the enterprise through the implementation of Pharos Blueprint. By introducing secure print workflows, the organization ensured that sensitive documents were never left unattended. Users were required to authenticate at the device before releasing print jobs, which strengthened information security and reduced the risk of data exposure.

To gain better visibility into printing habits and costs, the company used Pharos Insights to measure and understand how print was generated across the organization. The analytics platform provided the fact-based intelligence needed to make data-driven decisions, optimize its multi-vendor print fleet, and identify opportunities for cost reduction and efficiency improvements.

With these insights, the IT team achieved substantial cost savings and improved operational efficiency by reducing the number of print servers from 620 to 132. This allowed IT staff to focus on higher-value initiatives instead of infrastructure maintenance.

In 2022, as part of a broader enterprise-wide IT modernization effort, the insurer advanced its strategy by transitioning from the on-premises Blueprint platform to Pharos Cloud. This move aligned with its vision to eliminate print servers, simplify IT operations, reduce support costs, and increase agility. The migration was completed in just nine months with minimal disruption to business operations.

To further enhance efficiency, the company developed an integration between Pharos Cloud and ServiceNow. This allowed meter reads, office names, IP addresses, and other device data to flow directly into ServiceNow for asset management. The integration improved visibility across the print environment and empowered the Help Desk by linking tickets to specific device records, creating a detailed support history and reducing resolution times.

Result

By aligning print capacity with business needs, making data-driven decisions based on Pharos Insights, eliminating abandoned prints with secure print workflows, and further reducing print servers to just three from 620 by migrating to cloud. With Pharos, the company:

• Achieved more than $100 million in total cost savings since 2011, lowering annual print costs 95%, from $16 million to $800K
• Reduced the total pages printed annually by 93%, from 276 million to 18.5 million
• Reduced the total number of print devices by 91%, from 6,650 devices to 563 devices
• Eliminated more than 99.5% of print servers, saving an additional $1.5 million per year

Today, with Pharos Cloud at the center of their strategy, this global insurer continues to optimize print operations, strengthen information security, and modernize IT.