PrinterLogic Secure Release Printing Now Works with Kyocera Multifunction Printers

PrinterLogic is pleased to announce the release of an all-new Control Panel Application (CPA) for select FS, TASKalfa, and ECOSYS series multifunction printers from Kyocera. The introduction brings to 10 the total number of MFP brands supported by our SaaS and Virtual Appliance platforms for secure printing.

The Kyocera CPA follows our recent announcement of the PrinterLogic Fuji Xerox CPA and will come as equally welcome news to customers in the European and Asia-Pacific regions, where Kyocera is especially popular.

The PrinterLogic app installs directly on the printer and provides a flexible secure-printing experience for IT administrators and end users alike. PrinterLogic’s Kyocera CPA will work with any printer running Java VM version 1.4 subset and above—including models such as the FS C8525MFP, TASKalfa 6052ci, and ECOSYS M3540idn. 

You can view the full list of supported models here.

The PrinterLogic Kyocera CPA is built entirely on our second-generation CPA platform, which leverages the rich capabilities of our cloud-native SaaS printing solution to provide a more seamless and more secure experience across multiple printer models and brands. Kyocera vetted and approved the CPA prior to release.

New Advanced Security Bundle supports 90+ percent of the commercial MFP market

With this addition, PrinterLogic’s SaaS and Virtual Appliance platforms now support ten major network printer brands, representing well over 90 percent of the commercial multifunction printer market. Secure Release Printing is available as part of the PrinterLogic Advanced Security Bundle, introduced in January.

Secure Release Printing—also known as pull printing or “follow me” printing—ensures that the user who initiates the print job is physically standing at the printer before the output appears in the tray. This approach helps protect confidential information and reduces waste caused by redundant or abandoned print jobs.

New app uses PrinterLogic’s latest SSO and IdP support technology

The new CPA employs core PrinterLogic technology that supports Single Sign-On (SSO) protocols. Users authenticate one time to access any app or function on that printer. Once the user authenticates on the printer, PrinterLogic’s app employs a “listener” mode and allows them to release held documents without signing in again.  

The new app features an intuitive touchscreen interface that gives users four choices for proving their identity. These include badge swipe, smartphone release with QR code support, UserID/PIN, and conventional Username/Password login credentials. PrinterLogic supports Microsoft Active Directory and leading cloud-based Identity Providers (IdPs) such as Okta, Azure AD, Google Identity, Ping, and more.

How it works: Secure Release Printing workflow for users

Once network printers are configured for either pull printing or secure printing, the user workflow proceeds as follows:

  • First, a user prints from their workstation as usual, and the print job is held securely on the workstation until the user goes to the printer to retrieve it. 
  • At the printer, the user swipes their badge or authenticates using any of the available methods. All held print jobs appear on the printer’s screen. Users simply pick the job or jobs they want to print. Or, users can delete jobs they no longer care about.
  • With the pull-printing option, a universal driver is used. That means users can decide which printer they want to use after initiating the print job.

Secure printing ensures that confidential documents get into the right hands and aren’t left sitting on a printer tray to tempt prying eyes. In addition, these methods do away with abandoned print jobs and wasted consumables. For more details, see our Secure Release Printing feature page.

In addition to secure printing, PrinterLogic offers many other security features:

  • PrinterLogic eliminates print servers, each of which is a repository for thousands of confidential documents and is vulnerable to an attack.
  • PrinterLogic has passed the AWS Well-Architected Review and inherits all of the benefits of AWS Cloud Security.
  • PrinterLogic uses centrally-managed direct IP printing to keep jobs local. Printing continues even if your internet connection goes down.
  • PrinterLogic automatically logs document name, print source, print destination, and authenticated username for audit tracking and data-loss prevention.
  • PrinterLogic’s architecture complies with strict U.S. government standards (FIPS 140-2, with 140-3 compliance pending).
  • PrinterLogic supports multifactor authentication, including CAC/PIV-enabled release printing on any network printer.

A true SaaS solution that eliminates all print-related infrastructure

Unlike some “cloud-optimized” print management software, PrinterLogic is a true, multi-tenant SaaS offering. It’s not a cloud-hosted shortcut that leaves you stuck with server licensing, configuration, and maintenance. Automatic updates ensure you have the most current and reliable solution possible—backed by a guaranteed service-level agreement.

Oracle Health Printing Just Got Better: Introducing PrinterLogic’s new LPD Service

PrinterLogic’s healthcare customers value our serverless printing solution for the secure, unified print management that it provides. We help tame the complexity of conducting general office printing alongside EHR/EMR solutions, which almost always come with their own print infrastructure and framework.

As part of our efforts to make that day-to-day experience even better for clinicians, nurses, doctors, and receptionists while reducing the load on IT admins, we’ve been developing functionality that will better manage back-end Oracle Health electronic health record (EHR) printing and output.

The newest addition to that functionality is our LPD Service. It’s a modest name with big impacts on convenience and ease of use—especially in healthcare settings that use Oracle Health EHR software.

 

What Is LPD and How Does It Work?

The line printer daemon (LPD) is part of a standard software protocol that allows networked computers to submit print jobs to printers on the same network. You might have even seen it as an option when you’re installing a conventional printer on your home PC. The LPD is the middleman responsible for relaying print jobs to the network printer.

In PrinterLogic, our LPD Service works by identifying a service client computer in the network that’s already running the standard PrinterLogic client agent. The LPD Service runs in the background and listens for compatible print jobs.

Once the LPD Service has been enabled by an admin, it can receive LPD print traffic and extract information from the print job’s bundled metadata. That info reveals who printed the job, which printer it’s targeting as well as details like finishing options (e.g., duplex, B/W, output tray) and secure release settings. Based on that metadata, the print job will be routed to the correct printer, including off-network printers, and held for release if requested.

The same metadata is also used for PrinterLogic’s reporting functionality. Details like the initiating user, destination printer, timestamp, and filename are collected and uploaded to the PrinterLogic Admin Console.

PrinterLogic prepares the file for printing and will send it to the printer without a driver, either via RAW or LPR, as configured by the administrator.

Cerner EHR Printing

 

The Benefits of LPD in Oracle Health Environments

Oracle Health provides one of the world’s leading EHR solutions. It’s used throughout the healthcare industry to access and securely maintain vast stores of confidential patient medical information. By design, it becomes the central fixture of an organization’s print environment. Pretty much every document passes through Oracle Health EHR before it’s printed to paper.

Unfortunately, this can cause issues with general office printing and back-end applications, not least because Oracle Health has its own server-based print infrastructure. Device incompatibilities, downtime, and routine printing errors can be common occurrences, and they multiply in IT environments with diverse printer fleets.

PrinterLogic’s new LPD Service leverages the universal line print remote (LPR) printing standard—the same one that Oracle Health’s own EHR system uses—to make everyday printing more efficient and reliable. It enables users to print from backend applications without the need for legacy print servers, which neatly sidesteps all the problems inherent to those print servers.

Best of all, PrinterLogic’s LPD Service can do this while still tapping into PrinterLogic’s advanced features:

  • Comprehensive reporting: See who printed what, when, where, and why.
  • Pull printing: Jobs are held until the user is ready to retrieve them. This keeps protected health information (PHI) from sitting unclaimed in output trays.
  • Off-Network Printing: Conveniently allow devices to print while still maintaining strict Zero Trust policies.

These features complement the strict security of EHR systems and enable organizations to maintain compliance with HIPAA and other industry regulations.

The LPD Service also helps with print resiliency to avoid downtime. Multiple PrinterLogic LPD Service clients can be used to create redundancy. These can be set up behind a load balancer or configured to communicate among themselves for failover scenarios.

 

A Complete Printing and Print-Management Solution

The LPD Service is a big deal for Oracle Health users, but it’s just one benefit among many that PrinterLogic offers to healthcare organizations. With our serverless printing solution, you can:

  • Lower costs: Fragmented solutions and all their support infrastructure can lead to mounting costs. By minimizing the hardware footprint and eliminating deep-rooted print inefficiencies, PrinterLogic keeps costs down.
  • Simplify print management: It can be difficult to bridge the different systems for EMR and general office printing. PrinterLogic helps to unify the print environment and provides a single window for IT to oversee it.
  • Harden security: Thanks to its pull printing and Off-network Printing functionality, PrinterLogic augments the security of Oracle Health and similar EMR/EHR solutions without sacrificing ease of use.
  • Leverage reporting: In addition to capturing extensive metadata for every print job, PrinterLogic offers a convenient way to view, filter, and sort that information. IT can easily monitor print activity across the organization.

PrinterLogic’s LPD Service is part of our Output Management solution, designed to give organizations granular control over everything they print, including features like:

  • Rules & Routing
  • Confirmed Delivery 
  • Batch Printing

If your organization manages many critical output processes for the business to function efficiently and successfully and is trying to do it over various disparate systems, or if you’re just looking for more reliability overall, chat with us about your goals, and we’ll discuss where we can help.

 

Print Security: Protect Your Company’s Devices, Documents and Data

Originally published on August 29, 2017

Printers are often an afterthought when the subject of security arises. When, in reality, they’re central to how an organization operates. Sending a print job containing sensitive information begins with the end user, but the in-between channels are where that sensitive information is subject to be viewed (intentionally or unintentionally). We can always store passwords on digital documents, encrypt folders, and install VPNs to limit external access to our organization’s internal networks. But print security remains a challenge for three important reasons:

1. Printing is physical.

Digital documents can be locked away. We can restrict who’s able to access them and monitor when they do. Secure printing is another story. All too often, printed documents are left exposed for anyone to see—not just on someone’s desk, but right there in the printer’s output tray! Let the office gossip begin!

Furthermore, companies adopting a full-on remote workforce are witnessing a whole slew of problems with print security. 

Here’s a short scenario for you: Let’s say, Steve, a remote employee, is trying to print a document for someone in HR residing at the company headquarters. This document gets delivered to the correct printer; however, the HR specialist left the office briefly. Steve’s document is now in the hands of anyone and everyone without his authorization. Now everyone can see that he got a pay raise and a promotion before it becomes public, leading to an HR disaster. 

Situations like these are becoming more commonplace, leaving employees (or customers) exposed in a workplace that should be a safe haven for them.

2. Vulnerabilities when print jobs queue in the print spooler.

Recent vulnerabilities like Print Nightmare have wreaked havoc by potentially exposing company data. This vulnerability made it possible for attackers to access operating systems and run remote code with system privileges. Even now, PrintNightmare is still causing companies to second guess their printing architecture. 

Companies utilizing print servers to execute print jobs are at a high risk of being attacked. This is especially true for companies utilizing multiple print servers since they have to be constantly updated, patched, and secured. Every time a print job goes to a print server, it’s at risk of being exposed to hackers fighting to gain access to your network. This makes your ability to control who sees your confidential information minimal, especially without embracing a serverless printing solution. For this reason, your print management solution must align with your company’s zero-trust security strategy to limit exposure to confidential documents.

The pandemic took a toll on companies worldwide and left a lot of people anticipating the death of the printer. For those who believed that was the outcome–think again. According to a poll by Quocirca in January 2022, despite the digitization of workflow during the pandemic, 44% of companies anticipate an increase in office print volumes, signaling an uptick in print security spending by 70% of organizations in the next 12 months. 

It might be time to hop on the bandwagon and welcome print security (and the printer) with open arms.

3. Security in printing is only as strong as our end users.

Although we’ve all been told about the importance of creating a unique and virtually impenetrable password, it seems we still haven’t received the memo. The most popular passwords of 2022 are “password”, “qwerty”, and for the outside-the-box thinkers: “123456.” It’s easy to claim that these passwords stem from complete laziness; however, I would argue that no one wants to type in a 20-character password every time you need permission to perform a basic duty at work. 

The same principle applies to secure printing. If you try to increase security in printing by making it a complex, six-phase procedure for end users, you’re more likely to discourage them from actually using it. End users should feel empowered when executing a print job, not overburdened. This is why secure printing solutions have to be convenient enough for users to prefer them over ordinary insecure methods.

Why Secure Release Printing?

Secure Release Printing from PrinterLogic takes all of these issues into account. It can’t make sensitive documents invisible to everyone except their intended recipients, but it can keep documents in the hands of those who printed them. All the while, you can relax knowing the roots of company chaos (i.e., print spooler and print server) are nonexistent.

Secure Release Printing is divided into two straightforward steps: the initiation of the print job and the release of that job at the printer. When a user with, say, a classified document clicks “Print,” the job is held in the user’s workstation. Once the user is physically at the printer, they can release the print job using one of the four methods:

  • A badge or card reader: If your organization already has a badge system, PrinterLogic’s Secure Release Printing can integrate with that system to release print jobs by authorized users via their associated badge. The reader might be built into the network printer itself or connected externally to the printer and the network.
  • Badge+PIN & User ID+PIN: Very effective for employees working in a high-security environment. This multi-factor authentication (MFA) feature provides an extra layer of security to keep confidential files out of unwanted hands. 
  • The Control Panel Application (CPA): PrinterLogic SaaS, our cloud-based serverless printing infrastructure, offers an embedded app for all major printer brands. This app allows users to log in, identify their print job, and release it for printing. 
  • Any browser: Using PrinterLogic’s web-based app, authorized users can release print jobs from any device that is capable of running a browser including mobile devices (iOS and Android). 

Keeping your information private has never been more seamless. Instead of your jobs being held on a shared print server, they are held securely on the user’s workstation giving the user full control over the outcome of the print job through user authentication.