By 2021, cybersecurity damages are estimated to hit $6 trillion annually. If you were to break down that global tally, you’re looking at an average cost of $3.92 million per data breach—a figure that’s risen by 12% in the past five years alone. The increasing severity and scale of enterprise data breaches has fueled that rise.

Taking a stronger stance on secure printing is one important step toward reducing risk. Organizations have typically been pretty lax in their approach to enterprise printing because they don’t want to inconvenience end users. Heaven knows their IT departments are bound to get an earful if they do.

But when they’re done right, features like secure release printing can harden your print environment and become a seamless part of your end users’ printing workflow. A solution like PrinterLogic can even help you eliminate print servers in the process.

The best way to safeguard enterprise printing

Secure printing usually employs a release mechanism. This means that the end user prints to their desired printer as usual. Then the print job is held until the end user is physically present at the destination printer. Once there, they can authenticate themselves and trigger their print job.

Authentication commonly takes place through either ID card or PIN verification. For one, the end user swipes their card or badge through a hardware reader that’s been paired with the printer. For the other, they input their username and/or PIN on the printer’s control panel. Their credentials are established through identity services like Active Directory.

This adds security to enterprise printing by limiting document exposure. Print jobs don’t end up sitting in the output tray for all to see. And it decreases the chances of end users printing a sensitive document to the wrong printer by accident.

Why secure printing is even better with PrinterLogic 

In most organizations, the shortcomings of secure release printing have tended to be limited printer support, weak integration with popular identity services and poor ease of use. PrinterLogic overcomes all those shortcomings.

Thanks to PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure, any network printer can be configured as a secure-release printer. That extends the useful lifespan of legacy devices and saves your organization from having to invest in new enterprise printing hardware.

As a further benefit, PrinterLogic also lets you eliminate print servers. That gets rid of an easy attack vector for malicious actors and saves additional money and headache by removing a major pain point in print management.

Depending on your print environment, end users then have multiple authentication mechanisms to choose from:

• Swiping their badge or ID card
• Using PrinterLogic’s Print Release App on their iOS or Android smartphone
• Entering their credentials on the printer’s control panel

That last one is a particular strength of PrinterLogic. Our new Control Panel Platform puts native PrinterLogic applications on major printer brands throughout the world, making it even easier and faster for end users to authenticate.

As part of the verification and authorization process, PrinterLogic has offered seamless integration with identity services like Active Directory since the very beginning. More recently, our cloud-first enterprise printing solution, PrinterLogic SaaS, added native integration with the future of that platform, Azure AD.

And that’s not all. PrinterLogic SaaS also now supports embedded integration with Okta, the leading cloud-based identity provider (IdP). This blog post has more information on both of those integrations—including the possibilities they open up for further secure printing features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO).

Eliminate print servers and secure your enterprise printing today

EPIC Management, L.P. is a California-based managed services provider specializing in healthcare. When they wanted to eliminate print servers and implement PHI-compliant secure printing in a challenging Citrix environment, they chose PrinterLogic.

Now their customers’ enterprise printing is reliable and secure, and managing the entire distributed print environment can be done in the “10 seconds before lunch.” Read the case study here.

If you’re looking at minimizing risk through secure printing, you’ll be psyched about our no-risk trial. Sign up today to test all the capabilities of PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure completely free of charge for 30 days.

One of the biggest contributors to inefficiency is fragmentation. Without unified control and oversight, you waste a lot of time doing individual status checks and performing repeat actions. That’s as true when dealing with technology as it is with people.

Fragmentation has long been the enemy of the enterprise print environment. And yet the enterprise print environment is still where fragmentation can most often be found.

Some organizations go looking for the answer to fragmentation in managed print services. But the permanent fix lies in centralized print management—specifically, the centralized print management that comes from PrinterLogic’s serverless printing.

As a matter of fact, PrinterLogic is the solution that managed print services providers like Independent Photocopier Services turn to when they want to standardize disparate print environments. (You can read that case study here.)

What makes PrinterLogic unique?

PrinterLogic uses the killer combination of robust direct IP printing and effortless centralized print management to bring incredible control and ease of use to enterprise printing.

From a single pane of glass, admins can monitor the entire print environment and carry out all print-management tasks across the organization. It doesn’t matter how geographically distributed it is. Using PrinterLogic’s intuitive admin console, IT staff can:

• Create, remove or edit printers individually or in bulk: From deploying a printer to a lone user up to deleting a set of printers from an entire department, PrinterLogic lets you do it all swiftly from one screen.
• Monitor and manage printer queues: Unlike print servers, PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure provides a consolidated window onto multiple print queues—even in globally distributed organizations.
• Perform audits on your entire print environment: Total oversight and powerful built-in reporting tools make it super easy to collect and analyze the full scope of print activity.
• Update drivers, change profile settings and create custom configurations: PrinterLogic’s common driver repository reduces repetitive changes to single steps. Setting automatic defaults for, say, black-and-white printing can be as simple as ticking a checkbox.

It’s not hard to see why in-house IT staff as well as managed print services providers find that feature set useful. Plenty of PrinterLogic customers can attest to the real-world results.

BankPlus, an independent community bank in Mississippi, rolled out PrinterLogic to unify its print environment through centralized print management. In addition to dramatically reducing man hours and help desk calls, BankPlus eliminated 65 print servers across its branch offices thanks to PrinterLogic’s serverless printing. (Read that case study here.)

Designed to make life easier for the end user too

IT and managed print services providers aren’t the only ones who benefit from serverless printing and centralized print management. End users do as well.

That’s because PrinterLogic builds on that foundation to provide them with a self-service printer installation portal. When end users need a new printer, they can just visit the web-based portal, browse the optional floorplan maps to find the closest printer, and then safely install it—along with any necessary drivers—just by clicking on the printer icon. That saves them from having to call the help desk for routine installs. Which is also great news for IT support staff.

Meanwhile, executives appreciate PrinterLogic’s auditing capabilities because it gives them way more visibility into the organization. Admins and managed print services providers can set up automated reports on print activity to be emailed to department heads and decision-makers on a regular basis. That comprehensive data can be used to inform cost-cutting initiatives, printer fleet consolidation or identify excessive printer usage.

The net benefit of centralized print management is less work for IT admins and support staff along with smoother, more reliable day-to-day printing for end users. And PrinterLogic’s serverless printing also eliminates the cost and maintenance of legacy print infrastructure.

Put an end to inefficient, expensive fragmentation in your organization’s print environment—or the print environments of your managed print services customers. PrinterLogic is a quick, cost-effective and proven path to centralized print management.

Best of all, we take the guesswork out of implementation. Simply sign up today for a free, full-featured demo of our serverless printing software. That will give you the opportunity to try out our zero-footprint cloud solution, PrinterLogic SaaS, or our on-prem solution, PrinterLogic Web Stack, as a proof of concept for 30 days.

Slow printing on networked printers is probably one of end users’ biggest enterprise printing pet peeves. That makes it one of IT’s biggest pet peeves, too, because they’re the ones who have to deal with all the support tickets.

What causes slow network printing? The culprits can vary depending on your printing solution, but it often comes down to one thing: overtaxed print servers. They can put the brake on printing speeds, making it seem like an eternity between users clicking “Print” and finally being able to retrieve their documents.

Print servers are problematic by design. All print jobs get routed through them, which means that an unusually large number of print jobs, a high sustained printing workload or software/hardware errors can all have a negative impact on printing. As a result, enterprise printing infrastructures become a collection of bottlenecks and single points of failure.

It gets worse when you’re running consolidated print servers. What you might gain in reduced infrastructure or simplicity of management you lose through decreased liability. One user sending large files like uncompressed PDFs or vector files can bog down printing for everyone. Plus remote offices see even higher lag times because their print jobs have to cross the WAN.

A complex problem with a simple solution 

The solution is simple: Eliminate print servers. But I can already see some folks shaking their heads. “Eliminate print servers? There’s no way you can do that in an enterprise environment!”

The thing is, you can eliminate print servers—every last one—from your print environment. Along with solving the ongoing problem of slow printing, you can do it in a way that brings greater ease and way more scalability than competing printing solutions.

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure is how.

• No more single points of failure: Even though PrinterLogic gives admins centralized management of the entire print environment, its direct IP architecture is closer to a client-centric printing model. That equals more robust, resilient enterprise printing. Print jobs don’t have to be routed through a slow, unreliable server.
• Gets rid of WAN bottlenecks: PrinterLogic’s direct IP printing has another benefit. It keeps print jobs on the local network, so they don’t cross the WAN. That frees up bandwidth for other applications. It also prevents latency and network traffic volumes from affecting printing speed.
• More visibility, easier management: Rogue drivers can add to print servers’ long list of problems. Using PrinterLogic’s common repository, admins can easily monitor, update and roll back printer drivers to keep things running smoothly. The intuitive web-based admin console also makes it easier to tweak settings and troubleshoot.

The need for (printing) speed

Hrvatska pošta (Croatian Post) had about the toughest enterprise printing demands you could imagine. It had over 1,000 remote post offices, many of which were linked to the mainland via spotty WAN connections. It needed to fold these locations into its unique Citrix-based Private Cloud initiative and provide them all with superfast, rock-solid printing while eliminating print servers.

PrinterLogic made that possible. It outperformed other printing solutions by unifying a chaotic printer fleet and ensuring seamless VDI printing. Its common repository ironed out driver issues that were causing slow printing. Today, printing speeds and print management are non-issues. Read the Hrvatska pošta case study here.

If you and your end users feel the need for printing speed, give PrinterLogic a try and see how it can accelerate printing in your enterprise environment. Sign up now (it’s easy and quick, of course!) for your PrinterLogic demo and test it totally free of charge for 30 days.

Pull printing is a feature that divides the typical printing process into two parts. First, the end user prints as usual, but the print job is held instead of printing automatically. Second, the user “releases” that print job on their chosen printer.

You might be saying, “Hold on. We’re always trying to make printing easier for end users. How does a two-part printing process improve things?”

It’s a good question. Pull printing seems like it would run counter to print management best practices.

Pull printing actually has huge benefits

•  It’s convenient. Pull printing lets users retrieve pending print jobs at different printers, wait before releasing their job or just forget about the job altogether. That’s ideal for creating end-user mobility.
• It’s more secure. When users are physically present to release their print jobs, those documents don’t sit unattended in the tray. A more rigorous type of pull printing, secure release printing, even adds authorization to the release step.
• It saves money. Some estimates say unclaimed print jobs are as high as 20% of all print output. When those jobs aren’t printed out to begin with, that waste turns into savings.
• It’s green. Eliminating the waste of unclaimed print jobs doesn’t just save money. It also saves natural resources.

All of that raises another important question: If pull printing is so great, why haven’t more organizations adopted it yet?

That comes down to three general concerns.

With traditional print management solutions, such as print servers, those concerns are justified. And yet, as Georgia’s Fulton County School System discovered, PrinterLogic isn’t your traditional print management solution. Its serverless printing infrastructure made it possible for them to eliminate print servers and roll out user-friendly pull printing to their staff. Read the case study here.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look at those concerns that hold up the adoption of pull printing.

1. We’d have to purchase new printers or even replace our existing fleet.

That might be true with when you’re dealing with old school server-based solutions. PrinterLogic is a printer-agnostic, platform-agnostic, serverless software solution that can extend pull printing functionality to almost any network printer. So your existing fleet will work just fine with PrinterLogic.

Pretty much all you have to do is identify a printer of your choosing as a pull-printing-enabled printer in PrinterLogic’s centralized admin console. Then users can use something like PrinterLogic’s Print Release App on their iOS or Android device to release their pull-printing jobs.

2. It would cost a lot for us to implement pull printing.

A lot of organizations say this because they’re looking at pull printing as an extra solution. Or they’re thinking about all the infrastructure they might have to add to get it to work properly.

With PrinterLogic, pull printing is a native extension of the core solution. That means it’s not some extra layer on top of your print environment. It’s already there and ready to deploy as an optional feature.

Furthermore, our mantra has always been, “Eliminate print servers.” If you choose PrinterLogic for its seamless pull printing, you can also shrink your print infrastructure at the same time. It’s a double whammy that can end up saving money.

3. End users don’t need more confusion, IT doesn’t need more print management responsibilities.

PrinterLogic is all about making life easier for end users and reducing the burden on IT’s shoulders.

That’s why pull printing with PrinterLogic is as easy to implement as it is to use. From a print-management standpoint, it’s a simple matter of IT deciding which printers will be designated pull printers. That’s it.

And for your end users, it’s as simple as clicking “Print.” Later they can choose where they want their job to print out using the Print Release App, the printer’s control panel or even a Web browser. This way, they no longer have to worry about their jobs automatically printing at the wrong printer.

Migrating to a new print management solution can be a big decision. PrinterLogic takes the worry out of that, too. We offer a full-featured trial so you can evaluate every aspect of PrinterLogic—from its pull-printing capabilities to its ability to eliminate print servers.

Print servers are one of the top sources of frustration in business printing. Just look at any online tech forum. Odds are that it’s full of threads started by IT professionals who’ve been driven to distraction by one or more printing issues. Printers are disappearing from workstations. Group policy deployments aren’t working like they should. A rogue process keeps crashing the spooler. Driver management is a nightmare.

The conversation on those threads is revealing. While there are plenty of fellow sufferers who try to help troubleshoot the problems and offer alternative printing solutions, print servers do have some defenders. More often than not, though, they tend to take the “better the devil you know” stance. Print servers have serious shortcomings, they admit. But you can’t seriously think of eliminating them.

I’m here to say that you can eliminate print servers without compromise. With a single solution, no less. You can ditch all that unwanted infrastructure and enjoy superior business printing and print management. That includes things like higher print availability, near infinite scalability and administration that’s virtually effortless.

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure makes it possible.

What if you already have consolidated print servers?

Print server consolidation takes all the printing in your organization and channels it through one device.

At first glance, that makes a lot of sense, which is why consolidation is still a popular choice among printing solutions. It simplifies basic print infrastructure. It simplifies print management. Well, kind of.

You see, consolidation puts a massive burden on a single piece of hardware—especially in large organizations. You’ve placed all your business printing “eggs” in one fragile basket, creating a single point of failure. That leaves your print environment vulnerable. If you want to ensure high print availability, you’ve now got to take that simplified infrastructure and augment it with additional servers for redundancy’s sake. That’s more hardware, more maintenance, more cost.

A new set of problems emerges if that consolidated print server is located offsite. Print jobs now have to cross the WAN, which means competing for bandwidth with Internet and cloud traffic. And, once again, availability is at risk. When—and that’s when, not if—the WAN connection is interrupted for any reason, printing has to stop until it’s resolved. That puts productivity at stake.

When you eliminate print servers with PrinterLogic, you get the benefits of a consolidated print environment without these single points of failure.

What about distributed print environments?

If you’re clinging to legacy printing solutions like print servers and you haven’t chosen to consolidate, then you’ve likely taken the opposite route. You’re running print servers at several—or all—of your locations.

Here, too, that choice is supported by an understandable rationale. Running more print servers helps to localize problems when they arise. It limits overall dependency on a single server. It reduces the amount of print traffic crossing the WAN.

But at what cost? With every print server you add to your environment, you’re adding to the management overhead. You’re spending more time and money on upgrades, oversight and maintenance. You’re bulking up the infrastructure when every best practice is saying that you should be slimming down.

In the end, instead of a nice, tidy, compartmentalized print environment, you wind up with a fragmented printing solution that limits visibility and takes more effort to administer.

PrinterLogic allows you to eliminate every last one of those print servers while keeping resilience and productivity high.

Migrating to PrinterLogic is seamless and quick

Regardless of whether your server-based print environment is consolidated or distributed, you can implement PrinterLogic to maximize the strengths of your preferred configuration and overcome its weaknesses. That’s what makes PrinterLogic the best choice among any of the available enterprise printing solutions.

Along with the ability to eliminate print servers, PrinterLogic:

• Has a powerful automated migration tool that lets you transfer existing printer objects quickly and easily
• Offers centralized management via its intuitive admin console—for total control from a single pane of glass
•  Empowers end users with a user-friendly self-service printer installation portal
• Integrates seamlessly with VDI solutions such as Citrix, Windows Virtual Desktop and VMware
• Enables targeted printer deployments without the need for GPOs or scripts

Australia’s Hospital and Medical Benefits System, or HAMBS, faced just about every business printing hurdle an organization could face. They had a geographically distributed customer base. They’re a dedicated Citrix shop. They’re tightly bound by healthcare regulation. They even had multitenancy needs.

By implementing PrinterLogic, HAMBS drastically cut its time spent on print management, increased its administrative oversight and created a consistent print environment that its funds and end users love. Read the case study here.

Put the days of print server frustration behind you. PrinterLogic is leading the next generation of printing solutions, making it possible to completely eliminate print servers—and with them, a major resource drain on IT.

In the album Deltron3030, Teren Delvon Jones (aka Deltron) drops the line “I want to devise a virus to bring dire straits to your environment. Crush your corporations with a mild touch, crash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus.”

In case you think it’s placed for it’s lyrical content alone, consider the poignant reality in those words that individuals and corporations around the world are currently feeling – specifically, our vulnerability to unexpected threats. 

As individuals, communities, corporations and governmental institutions work toward solutions, it’s only natural that we evaluate our preparedness and overall posture in meeting unexpected threats, and honestly assess our ability to meet those threats. It’s in this paradigm that I want to share a few thoughts about IT security posture and how to mitigate the unforeseen vulnerabilities in your print infrastructure. I’ll also discuss the direction that your print infrastructure is moving, or at least will be moving toward in the coming 12 months or so. 

Moving to the cloud won’t necessarily improve security

Part of any computer system that’s vulnerable is the print infrastructure. It’s not just your legacy on-prem infrastructure that creates vulnerabilities. It could be your cloud strategy, or it could be your mobile/BYOD infrastructure. It could even be part of the IOT connected devices that are leeching data from the organization.

According to Quocirca’s Print 2025 study, 73% of organizations expect to either transition to cloud print management or increase their usage through 2025. The ease of that transition, as well as the strategy behind it, will be incredibly important for the future security posture of the organization. 

Unfortunately, not all cloud-based software solutions provide the same level of security. A “lift and shift” is likely the most common transition scenario, with the organization moving existing print architecture to the cloud. While this offers the perceived benefit of a cloud-based strategy, it doesn’t truly provide the benefit that elimination of print servers can deliver.

By eliminating print servers, PrinterLogic is able to remove a potential attack vector. Breach of any print server, whether in the cloud or on-prem, results in compromised managed print queues. That, in turn, grants a malicious actor access to each user who uses the compromised print queue. 

A more secure solution is to eliminate the potential for attack by decentralizing management of print queues altogether. The organization opts for the localization of print jobs through centralized direct-IP printing. When print jobs are locally executed between an originating workstation and a printer, the point of attack is eliminated.

Workforce flexibility and Deltron’s dire straits

Another key factor identified in Quocirca’s report stated that “By 2025, 66% of an organisation’s workforce is expected to be mobile, up from 49% now. The convergence of distributed offices, remote and field workers and cross-team collaboration opens new opportunities for integrated communication and collaboration platforms.”

As Gen Z workers start to populate the workforce, the emphasis on flexible BYOD and work mobility will put increasing pressure on IT admins. Workforce flexibility comes with perceived risk as the network perimeter is extended to remote workers. This, in turn, creates more possibilities for malicious actors to bring those “dire straits to your environment,” a la Deltron.

Fortunately, the PrinterLogic SaaS solution allows for both user flexibility and enhanced print security. PrinterLogic SaaS administrators have easy access to deploy and manage print queues. And this includes the ability to create and enforce deployment/access policies whose dependencies do not rely on other (possibly changing) variables inside of a corporate network.

Secure Release Printing keeps sensitive files safe

Additional flexibility and increased security come through the option to provide secure release printing. This feature allows end-users the flexibility to send, but temporarily hold on their workstation, print jobs to be released later at a printer of the user’s choosing.

When it’s time to retrieve those held jobs, they’re released for printing when the user moves to a printer and securely authenticates their identity. Authentication options include badge swipe, entering login credentials via the printer’s console and using the PrinterLogic smartphone app.

So instead of print jobs being generated automatically, then sitting on an output tray for all eyes to see or for sticky fingers to snatch, PrinterLogic keeps sensitive files secure from the time they’re sent to the printer until they’re retrieved by the originator.

In closing, one more thought on print security. The architecture of PrinterLogic’s solution keeps all print jobs on the local network. Only meta-data ever crosses the cloud.

End users are always a consideration in decisions that involve business printing and print management. How will they respond to a change in the printing workflow? Will they be able to understand and use a new device or feature? Will they actually stick to a certain practice? Questions like these come up again and again.

And yet, even companies that have their end users’ best interest at heart can struggle with getting them to accept new technologies and workflows.

That’s certainly true of cloud solutions. As they become more widely adopted in the enterprise on account of their flexibility and scalability, businesses can still have a tough time getting end users on board. Fear of employee pushback can leave those businesses stuck with a hybrid print environment.

What is a hybrid print environment?

Hybrid printing involves using cloud printing solutions alongside traditional on-prem printing solutions like print servers. It’s a neither-fish-nor-fowl mix that tries to reap some of the benefits of the cloud while trying to appease a user base that’s familiar with legacy printing models.

This compromise between old and new has made hybrid printing one of the most common business printing infrastructures. But it has some drawbacks—including the fact that it leaves both IT and end users caught between two worlds. Hybrid printing doesn’t completely eliminate print servers. It complicates print management. And its inefficiency can offset some of the anticipated gains from cloud printing.

Let’s look at a few of the specific downsides of hybrid printing.

Some drawbacks of hybrid printing

One of the most glaring problems with hybrid printing is the inconsistency it causes in the client printing experience. A number of issues arise from that lack of consistency:

• End users are forced to remember different settings and protocols when printing in different scenarios
• Incompatibilities and configuration mismatches lead to end-user frustration (and helpdesk calls)
• Print-management duties are effectively doubled as IT is tasked with maintaining two business printing solutions

For end users, printing in a hybrid print environment often means having to jump through extra hoops. Printing should be effortlessly simple, but their day-to-day experience is anything but. And that has long-term knock-on effects. It fosters a wider distrust of any new technology that the company chooses to implement.

For IT, the antagonistic relationship with end users and the rising number of helpdesk tickets can be a drain on resources. Printer fleets with various makes, models and drivers just make that situation worse. They only add to the print management workload.

A solution for hybrid print environments

Though it sometimes seems elusive, there is a sweet spot between meeting end users’ needs and adopting forward-looking business printing solutions. It’s PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure.

By implementing PrinterLogic, companies can eliminate print servers to minimize print infrastructure and achieve streamlined print management. At the same time, end users get to enjoy printing that’s straightforward and uniform across the organization.

Through features like centralized management, PrinterLogic avoids the pitfalls of hybrid print environments. It improves printing workflows and print management by creating a unified print environment that’s:

• Easy to administer: Admins can monitor and control the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. They can quickly deploy and manage printer objects, including drivers and profiles, through one intuitive console.
• Consistent and user friendly: The printing process is the same for users no matter where they happen to be. There’s no more workflow A for cloud printing, workflow B for print servers.
• Empowering for end users: Thanks to PrinterLogic’s self-service printer installation portal, any end user can safely install authorized printers and start printing in seconds. Without calling IT for support. 
• Rich in advanced features: It’s no longer necessary to pile on extra solutions to gain added functionality. PrinterLogic offers optional native solutions for mobile printing and secure release printing as well as print reporting and auditing.

Unlike hybrid environments, PrinterLogic also doesn’t keep IT and end users hopping between two platforms. PrinterLogic SaaS is a fully cloud-based solution, whereas PrinterLogic Web Stack is for companies that feel more comfortable with on-prem. Both eliminate print servers and offer the same incredible advantages, such as centralized print management and resilient printing.

The fact that end users love PrinterLogic has made it a go-to business printing solution for hundreds of companies. Managed service providers like The Conversant Group use PrinterLogic to eliminate print servers and standardize disparate print environments. They also know that end users will respond well to features like the self-service portal. Read the case study here.

With PrinterLogic, you can relieve IT of the print management burden while also giving end users the painless business printing they expect.

Do you know how much printing is costing your company? That’s a question that we’ve posed many times before. And we’ve answered it by delving into the “unseen” costs of printing or the total cost of printing (TCP). We’ve even shown how increased security and lower printing costs can go hand in hand.

Here the focus is a little different. I’m going to highlight what are arguably the two most common printing problems in the enterprise. 

But instead of just dwelling on the headache, we’re also going to consider how they affect costs. We’ll also look at how PrinterLogic’s serverless printing and its ability to eliminate print servers completely can solve those problems at their core. Plus, serverless printing brings a ton of further benefits—including major cost savings. 

Problem #1: Printer support is a constant drain on IT resources

In large organizations, an average day in IT involves a lot of time spent on print management. That includes things like printer support, troubleshooting printer problems for end users, managing drivers and so on.

Most of the IT admins we talk to say that they spend far too much time dealing with the nitty gritty of the print environment. Basic printer support and print-related issues account for a disproportionate number of their helpdesk calls. That ends up putting them in response mode. They’re too busy focusing on fixing issues instead of finding ways to make print management more efficient.

That’s the real financial impact of this constant drain on IT resources. It’s not just the cost of helpdesk calls. It’s the lost productivity from always putting out fires. It’s the inability to make fundamental, long-term optimizations to the print environment.

Why PrinterLogic is the solution

Simplifying the print environment with PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure leads to fewer moving parts. Eliminate print servers and you eliminate everything that goes along with them: hardware, software, maintenance, hassle and costs.

At the same time, printer support becomes easier. Serverless printing creates the platform for centralized management, which allows you to oversee and control the entire print environment from one admin console. Want to configure advanced printer deployments? Roll back a driver update for select users? With PrinterLogic, it can all be done in a few clicks—and all from a single pane of glass.

Problem #2: Streamlining is just too much work

So, let’s say you’ve addressed the first problem. You’ve managed to eliminate print servers and implement serverless printing across your organization. You’re no longer pouring massive amounts of time and energy into printer support.

At this point, you’d like to start concentrating on efficiency. But then you think of all the things that would entail:

• Gaining macro- and micro-level visibility into print activity and consumables usage
• Making it super easy for mobile, BYOD and guest users to print
• Enabling end users to install printers themselves without calling the helpdesk
• Hardening security and reducing waste through pull printing

With a to-do list like that, it’s fair to conclude that the effort it would take to streamline the print environment would outweigh the benefits. Better to just to leave things as they are, right?

Why PrinterLogic is the solution

Along with centralized management, serverless printing with PrinterLogic makes it possible to implement a slew of features that would normally require discrete solutions.

PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting, for instance, allows you to monitor print activity and capture usage data from every nook and cranny of the print environment. Mobile printing lets smartphone, Chromebook and tablet users easily print to any authorized printer. Secure release printing offers multiple authentication methods to keep confidential documents safe while also curbing waste. And these features are a cinch to deploy because they’re native extensions of our core serverless printing solution.

PrinterLogic also features a self-service printer installation portal. This empowers end users to easily identify and safely install printers—plus any associated drivers—on their own.

Two problems, one solution

PrinterLogic’s cost-effective combo of serverless printing and seamless features are how the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in southeast Texas brought printer support tickets down from 2,500 to just a handful per year. In addition to eliminating print servers and all their baggage, the district’s ROI for PrinterLogic was estimated to be around $20,000 per year. Read the case study here.

The results can be the same for your company. Spending less time on printer support will free up resources to work on streamlining the print environment. And streamlining the print environment will be quicker and less costly, thanks to PrinterLogic’s powerful but easy-to-use features.

When we launched PrinterLogic’s all-new Control Panel Platform last summer, we were super excited about how it would augment the secure release printing capabilities of our serverless printing infrastructure.

Our customers were excited, too, because it meant their end users would be able to view and release print jobs more quickly, conveniently and securely than ever.

We kicked things off with the PrinterLogic Canon Control Panel Application (CPA). Along with being certified by Canon for full compatibility, it showcased the universal benefits of our new platform. Those include:

• Improved responsiveness. CPAs based on our latest version Control Panel Platform are faster to load and quicker to release secure print jobs.
• Single Sign-On (SSO) firmware support. PrinterLogic’s new CPAs function as both the SSO “provider” and “listener.” That allows for smoother user authentication.
• Easier administration. Installing our latest CPAs is the streamlined process that you’d expect from our intuitive print management software. IT also has access to better error handling and troubleshooting tools.
• A uniform experience. Since they’re based on a common platform, PrinterLogic CPAs provide a more consistent user interface and functionality across different printer brands.

Not long after we debuted our Canon CPA, we announced the availability of PrinterLogic’s CPA for Sharp multifunction printers (MFPs).

That release also introduced support for dual-factor authentication, a practice that’s already very common in government, financial, healthcare and legal circles. Configuring the PrinterLogic CPA for dual-factor authentication requires users to swipe their ID badge as well as enter a PIN to authenticate. That extra layer of security helps confidential documents stay secure.

Updated CPAs for every major printer manufacturer

So far, PrinterLogic has issued the latest version of our CPAs for four global brands: Canon, Sharp, HP and Xerox. Customers who use PrinterLogic SaaS, our cloud-based serverless printing infrastructure, can already make use of those control panel applications on the many supported MFPs.

And by mid-2020, we’ll have expanded support to include three more major brands: Konica-Minolta, Ricoh and Lexmark. That means serverless secure printing with PrinterLogic SaaS and CPA-based release will be possible for 95% of all installed MFPs around the world.

That’s a pretty big milestone. Especially when you consider that PrinterLogic SaaS is still the only solution to deliver secure release printing from the cloud without requiring a traditional print server infrastructure.

Added security with more flexibility

Security should be a natural, fluid part of the printing workflow. That’s why PrinterLogic SaaS gives you rich options for how you actually implement serverless secure printing. Depending on your print management setup, the following release mechanisms are available to end users:

• Badge: If you have a badge or ID card system, users can authenticate by swiping their badge through an integrated or connected reader.
• Badge plus PIN: First, the user swipes as outlined above. Then they enter their PIN code on the PrinterLogic CPA.
• User ID plus PIN: In this case, both authentication steps are done using the CPA. 
• Mobile release app: PrinterLogic’s Print Release App is like a CPA in users’ pockets. It lets them authenticate and release or delete their jobs right from their iOS and Android smartphones. 

These convenient release methods work in conjunction with our serverless printing infrastructure to lock down sensitive info. By design, PrinterLogic SaaS holds secure print jobs on the user’s workstation—not a shared print server—until they’re released through authentication. That removes an otherwise potential security risk for malicious individuals or groups.