There’s a growing awareness of the risks of IT weak points and the costly consequences of security breaches. That has led many organizations to take a much more aggressive stance toward the security of their workflows and infrastructure. One particular aspect that often gets overlooked, though, is enterprise print security and the important role it plays in a strong, comprehensive security strategy.

High-Risk Environments in Enterprise Print Security
While organizations in any industry ignore the security of their print environment at their peril, there are a few fields where enterprise print security is doubly important because the associated risks are so much greater.

• Healthcare: It goes without saying that secure printing and tightly controlled print management is an absolute must in the healthcare industry. Hospitals, insurers and medical providers are subject to strict regulations on the maintenance and disclosure of sensitive patient information. Violations are not only severely punishable by law; they also shake patients’ trust in the organization.
• Finance: The banking and financial industry is also under strong regulatory and commercial pressure to ensure that confidential information stays that way. If information is compromised through the unintentional or deliberate exposure of account details, financial statements or transaction records, the repercussions can be swift and expensive.
• Legal: Printed documentation is a mainstay of the legal profession. Important contracts, personal wills, confidential memos and case histories are just the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers and legal aides therefore have to remain vigilant, which can and should involve monitoring each stage of the print process to keep private documents out of the public eye.
• Government: Secure printing is being increasingly adopted by municipal, state and federal organizations—along with their contractors—as standard operating procedure. At higher levels of government, some of this adoption can be attributed to tighter standards in the handling of digital information. But added rigorousness around printing and print management is also recognized as a best practice among governmental agencies.

What Does Secure Printing Look Like?
Currently, the most common approach to secure printing splits the printing process into two distinct steps. In the first step, the user prints as usual (i.e., by clicking “Print”). But instead of printing automatically on a default printer, most implementations of secure printing—sometimes conflated with Pull Printing for reasons that will become clear—then hold the print job in a queue to await the end user’s next instructions.

The second step involves releasing the print job for physical printing. This is when the user authorizes a particular printer to execute the print job using a particular authentication mechanism, examples of which will be outlined below. The advantage of this second step is that the user can generally choose to print the job on a nearby (and therefore more convenient) device instead of being forced to print exclusively on a default printer. Hence the notion of Pull Printing.

When enterprise printing solutions implement this two-step process properly, it offers more than just secure-printing capabilities. It’s also easy for the end user to understand, poses little to no disruption to the printing workflow (in fact, the flexibility of Pull Printing can actually be more convenient for the end user) and can even cut down on consumables usage because jobs are far less likely to be abandoned in the output tray.

What Makes PrinterLogic’s Secure Enterprise Printing Solutions Unique?
Thanks to its versatility, simplicity and superiority by design, PrinterLogic’s software sets itself apart from standard solutions because it:

• Keeps print jobs on the workstation, not the server: Ordinary enterprise printing solutions typically hold secure print jobs in a queue on a print server. This actually introduces an unnecessary security risk by consolidating secure print jobs and making them vulnerable to a single attack vector! PrinterLogic’s serverless print-management solution safely holds the print job on the user’s workstation until it is successfully released by the authorized user.
• Works with any network printer: Whereas some secure-printing solutions are limited by manufacturer or model compatibility, PrinterLogic gives you the ability to turn any network printer into a Pull Printing device. This saves organizations from having to purchase new hardware or restrict secure-printing functionality to certain users or departments.
• Multiple print-release authentication options: Whether your organization prefers to authenticate with badge/card readers (this is typically CAC/PIV in federal government applications), the printer’s embedded control panel or a dedicated mobile device in kiosk mode, you can be sure that PrinterLogic’s secure printing will support the method that best suits your environment.

Above all, PrinterLogic’s enterprise printing solutions are easy to deploy and administer, and that same ease extends to secure printing. From a practical print-management standpoint, this should come as welcome news to admins, who are often faced with a demand for secure printing but have no cost-effective way of implementing it across the enterprise and do not want the added burden of configuring and managing a Pull Printing solution.

Download a free 30-day trial of our serverless print-management software to see for yourself how PrinterLogic’s secure printing stacks up against that of other enterprise printing solutions. Our next-generation approach to enterprise print security can serve as a crucial building block in any overall security strategy, thereby helping to protect your data, documents and devices from unwanted access.

As static, deskbound workforces morph into dynamic, mobile ones and IT departments take steps to maximize functionality while reducing infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions have already become attractive options for organizations that want to cut down on overhead without sacrificing flexibility or features. However, one sticking point in the adoption of virtual solutions is VDI printing.

This has created what you might call two general virtual desktop printing scenarios. One involves making do with the virtual solution’s built-in printing capabilities. Admittedly, with the addition of features like location-based (proximity) printing, this native functionality has progressed by leaps and bounds over the years in major VDI solutions like Citrix and VMware. Yet it still has its share of shortcomings, particularly with regard to print management.

The second scenario involves adding a dedicated VDI printing solution to the environment in an attempt to replace the native VDI printing capability outright. These extra solutions might make it easier to introduce sought-after features like secure printing into the print environment, but they also add another layer of complexity. Instead of dealing with just one virtual solution, admins now have to oversee and manage multiple solutions that each address a discrete aspect of the virtual environment.

Perennial Pain Points in Virtual Desktop Printing

Depending on the approach to VDI printing that an organization chooses, it stands to experience multiple pain points that never really go away. For example, native printing functionality is typically undermined by a lack of control over printer deployments. Admins simply don’t have tools with the granular precision they need to provision the right printers to the right users reliably and automatically across the entire organization.

Meanwhile, despite their compatibility claims, third-party VDI printing solutions are often hamstrung by poor integration with the primary VDI solution or the organization’s wider IT environment. Each use case is a little different, and many VDI printing solutions lack the versatility and scalability that are necessary to adapt to every single implementation. To overcome this, they’ll place restrictions on software and hardware that can severely limit the organization’s room to maneuver.

One pain point that’s common to both types of virtual desktop printing approaches is the extra burden they place on the IT support staff, whether that be the help desk (which fields the reports of the issues) or admins (who are then tasked with troubleshooting and correcting the problem). The increased volume and frequency of support tickets and help-desk calls from VDI printing errors creates a drain on resources that can be expensive, time-consuming and ultimately a hindrance to the organization’s success.

The PrinterLogic Solution to VDI Printing

Rather than try to replace the native virtual desktop printing capabilities of a particular VDI solution, PrinterLogic augments and enhances those capabilities. That enables our advanced print-management solution to integrate seamlessly with popular virtual solutions like Citrix and VMware in even the most specialized and challenging environments. By the same token, PrinterLogic introduces more control and flexibility into the print environment, providing admins with a VDI printing platform that works with them, not against them.

Here are some of the specific ways PrinterLogic transforms VDI printing:

• Effortless location-based printing: Also referred to as proximity printing, this deployment method provisions printers to users automatically based on criteria such as their IP address. This allows all users—even roaming employees—within a particular IP range to print to a nearby printer with minimal configuration on the administrative side.
• Dynamic and automated deployments: In addition to proximity printing, admins can automatically assign printers to users based on a number of Active Directory (AD) criteria, including user, group, and organizational unit (OU). This gives admins the ideal tool to set up deployments with surgical precision under ever-changing conditions. Furthermore, PrinterLogic eliminates the need for GPOs and scripts in these advanced deployments, which can speed up login times and avoid common installation errors.
• Direct IP connections: Depending on the provisioning method, PrinterLogic’s next-generation VDI printing solution establishes one-to-one connections between the client and the printer. In addition to making virtual desktop printing faster and more robust, this cuts down on the excessive WAN traffic that can adversely impact the user experience in VDI environments.
• Self-service installation: PrinterLogic features a convenient self-service printer installation portal that empowers end users with the ability to easily identify and install printers that are close to them. They simply visit the web-based portal through their browser, view printers that are laid out on an optional floor plan map and then install their desired printer with a single click.

The proof of the effectiveness and efficiency of PrinterLogic lies in the implementation. Hrvatska pošta (Croatian Post) considered PrinterLogic to be a pivotal component in the success of its Citrix-based Private Cloud initiative (detailed in this case study), and La Roche College found PrinterLogic’s versatile VDI printing solution to be central to its migration to VMware (as they explain here).

To see how PrinterLogic can enhance your current VDI printing experience or aid in your organization’s migration to a VDI environment, sign up today for a free 30-day trial of our serverless software solution.

When you think about “Serverless Printing” you probably don’t think about Secure Printing. It kind of seems counterintuitive, right? Having your print job securely held so that you don’t have to run across the office to grab it off the printer before anyone else sees it, without a server to hold the job?

Well, now you can do that. PrinterLogic provides serverless printing and secure printing. You get client-based secure printing, with each print job held on the end user’s workstation instead of being stored in a central server that acts as a single point of failure. It’s secure, direct-IP printing. The same applies to Pull Printing. Jobs are held on the user’s workstation until they are released for printing.

Now to release these jobs you’ve probably heard of using ID badges, active directory credentials, or PIN codes. You have those options using PrinterLogic, but now we’re also very excited to offer the new PrinterLogic Print Release App for smartphones. Without any extra hardware or infrastructure of any kind, you are able to download the app, iOS or Android, log in, and see all your jobs being held for you. Voila!

Users can select multiple jobs to release at once.

Have printers from multiple manufacturers at every site you manage? No problem. The app is manufacturer agnostic. Don’t have the budget for badge readers for every printer? No problem. Download the app and hit release from your phone when you’re at the printer ready to retrieve your job.

This isn’t an entirely new concept for PrinterLogic. We have a mobile web-release portal that lets you use a phone and go to a URL to see your print jobs, and then release them. But what we found is that customers aren’t really using it because it’s not as easy as using an app. You had to bookmark the URL where print jobs are found and then sign in every time. Because it was a miniature browser page viewed on your phone screen, the type was small. It just wasn’t very convenient.

But it gave us a start. When we created the app we leveraged that back-end functionality and built on it. Our goal was to make it simple, while also not requiring someone to sign in again and again. With the Print Release App, you can set it and forget it. It looks clean and is intuitive to use. We made it so users can save their PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer) or PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) URL and their AD credentials locally. No documentation is required. A user can launch the app and use it right off the bat.

Getting and using the app is very straightforward. Just go to the App Store or Play Store and search for PrinterLogic. Download the app, sign in to the PrinterLogic URL, and use your regular credentials. No special login needed—just whatever you use to sign in to your computer.

This most easily works with PrinterLogic SaaS, our SaaS-based solution, because a user just needs an internet connection to release their print job. With PrinterLogic Web Stack, our on-premises solution, the user’s phone would need to be on the same network as the PrinterLogic Web Stack server or on a trusted network with access to the PrinterLogic Web Stack server.

Reach out to a PrinterLogic rep at any time to set up a meeting. Or check out the resources on our website. You can try out the new PrinterLogic Print Release app and provide true no-print-server secure printing to your organization!

A lot of organizations are moving forward with Cloud first strategies. One of the biggest hurdles for IT departments to overcome when going “cloud first” is understanding what to do with their print infrastructure. A cloud first strategy is in line with best practices for modernizing IT, data-center consolidation, and reducing infrastructure footprint.

When architecting an enterprise cloud strategy, an organization has two different approaches to printing to consider. These are:

• A cloud based print server (Microsoft or otherwise).
• A cloud based management server.

The key to understanding the difference between these two approaches is to understand how the print job is routed from the source to its destination.

Cloud Based Print Servers and Common Pain Points
Cloud Based Print Servers require a print job to be sent from its origin point to a print server in the cloud. For most organizations, this would require the job:

1. be passed from a workstation
2. through border routers
3. to a remote cloud “print server” hosted in the provider’s data center,
4. which would then render and spool the print job
5. before redirecting it back to the local area network
6. so it can be output on the printer.

By moving the print queueing and spooling from a local print server to a cloud based print server, an organization can get rid of their dependency on local print servers, but there will be tradeoffs that must be accepted:

• Single points of failure (a site loses connectivity)
  • If the cloud print service is unreachable, no one can print to any printer
• Users can become frustrated waiting for print jobs as they are pulled from the cloud to the local printers
• Sites with limited WAN connections will experience strain on their WAN links because every print job must be routed to the cloud and back to the site again
• Forced use of universal or proprietary cloud drivers results in loss of advanced printer features
  • Affecting MFPs that could otherwise take advantage of duplexing, stapling, finishing options and other advanced printer functionality

Cloud based print servers not only introduce the above problems but fail to address the traditional problems with on-prem print servers:

• Reliance on scripting or GPOs to get printers installed at the workstation level
• No accurate tracking and auditing of who is printing what, from where, to which printers
• Can’t enforce cost-efficient print settings like duplexing and/or grayscale printing

As it turns out, cloud based print servers present many of the same challenges as traditional on-prem print servers.

Direct IP Printing Managed by the Cloud
In contrast to cloud based printing, a better, more efficient and more reliable approach is to eliminate all print servers completely, both on-prem and in the cloud. Direct IP printing is a stable and proven printing architecture that eliminates the dependency on a print server routing a job to a printer.

With direct IP printing, when a user clicks print, their local workstation opens a connection directly with the printer on the local area network. This differs from a cloud print server trying to reach through the cloud access point to establish a connection with the printer.

Direct IP printing architecture improves upon cloud based print servers by providing:

• Redundancy—If a site loses internet connectivity, everyone can still print to any printer.
• Simplicity—No extra open firewall ports and print streams stay on the local area network.
• Print jobs print out immediately—Even faster than they did with local print servers.
• Improved Connections—Sites with limited WAN connections will not waste precious bandwidth routing print jobs through cloud access points.
• Advanced Functionality—MFPs retain their extra features (stapling, watermarking, PIN printing, etc.)
• Policies and enforcement—Any advanced features or “eco print” settings that the printers support can be applied.
• Complete Visibility—All print jobs are tracked and reported across all manufacturers, without using SNMP and includes local/USB printer usage.

PrinterLogic helps IT professionals eliminate print servers and deliver a highly-available serverless print infrastructure with our centrally managed direct IP platform. Check out the case studies and other resources at www.printerlogic.com to see how organizations around the globe deploy PrinterLogic to solve workforce print problems and secure print environments.

For organizations that value the security of pull printing and the flexibility of mobile solutions, we at PrinterLogic are excited to announce our dedicated Print Release App for iOS and Android.

Hot on the heels of our feature-packed 18.3 update, this all-new app complements and can be used in place of PrinterLogic’s other pull-printing release options. These options currently allow for secure user authentication through standard web browsers, badge/card readers and compatible printer control panels.

Whether your organization has already implemented PrinterLogic’s secure pull-printing feature or is looking to roll out our versatile, cost-effective secure printing solution, the Print Release App brings three distinct advantages.

1. Ease of Use
With PrinterLogic’s Print Release App, end users can conveniently view, select and release their held secure or mobile print jobs right on their smartphones. It’s as simple as tapping on the app icon, choosing their job from the list and selecting a destination printer. They’ll then get an on-screen notification when their job is released.

The list of available printers a job can be released to will update as jobs are selected.

Instead of signing in and authenticating each time they need to release a print job, end users only have to enter their credentials into the Print Release App once. The app automatically authenticates their login details from that point forward through PrinterLogic’s seamless integration with Active Directory. That convenience expedites end users’ printing workflows and makes secure pull printing a more attractive option for regular use. It’s equally easy on admins; as the Print Release App is user-accessible through the two major smartphone software channels, it doesn’t have to be provisioned separately.

2. Reduced Infrastructure
To fully support secure pull printing, organizations have typically had to provide dedicated hardware infrastructure for the release step. This could be anything from a networked badge reader to a discrete mobile device in kiosk mode situated next each printer.

By leveraging the mobile phones end users already have and know how to use, the Print Release App eliminates the need to procure or maintain any release infrastructure at all. Furthermore, the advanced biometric authentication mechanisms that exist in today’s smartphones act as a built-in gatekeeper, making app-based release equally—if not more—secure than ordinary PIN codes or even badge readers.

Sign in and select “Remember me” to save your login for later (left). Select your printer and tap the green printer icon to release (right).

This infrastructure independence is in line with our longstanding mission to eliminate print servers and empower end users through features like our self-service printer-installation portal. Likewise, it makes the Print Release App the ideal companion to our zero-footprint SaaS solution, PrinterCloud.

3. Universal Printer Support
The Print Release App works with any networked printer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a legacy device or a generic inkjet. As long as it can be connected to the organization’s PrinterLogic print environment, it can function as a secure pull printer.

Not only does this universal support enhance the flexibility of PrinterLogic’s pull-printing solution, it also has the potential to save additional costs, as organizations won’t be forced to purchase new or updated printing devices. End users will enjoy the practicality of securely releasing print jobs to any authorized printer in the workplace, and budget-conscious executives will appreciate the ability to derive more value from the existing printer fleet.

Download the Print Release App Today
PrinterLogic customers with pull-printing or mobile licenses can download the Print Release App on the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store today and immediately begin releasing their print jobs using this convenient, cost-saving method. If you’d like to know more, please read our Print Release App FAQ.

Not yet a PrinterLogic customer? Try our serverless print-management software in your organization for 30 days at no charge. The new Print Release App is just one of the many ways our next-generation solution can augment the manageability and capabilities of your enterprise print environment.