Consolidate Your Network Printers With PrinterLogic SaaS

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Simplify things. Minimize infrastructure. Do more with less.

You’ve probably heard these a time or two. And when you’ve already accumulated a ton of hardware, it’s hard to decide how and where to start. 

Printing is often an afterthought, but consolidating your network printers under one solution can prove to be one of the quickest ways to downsize your print hardware. This blog covers the ways you can reduce unnecessary hardware with PrinterLogic’s SaaS print management solution to cut costs, improve visibility, and remove the single point of failure.  

 

Start with eliminating your print servers

Though it might seem daunting to organizations married to a traditional print infrastructure, print server elimination is the most efficient way to consolidate and downsize your print environment. Thanks to next-generation solutions like PrinterLogic SaaS, eliminating print servers is as easy as rolling out our solution (which, as it happens, is really easy and very quick). PrinterLogic automatically migrates your printers and drivers to our centralized Admin Console so you can see your complete fleet from a single pane of glass. 

Migration is simple, but what truly separates PrinterLogic from other solutions is the speed of the migration compared to other solutions.

The trouble for other solutions on the market is that effective network printer consolidation requires extensive, real-time information on individual printers as well as the larger print environment. Most solutions have enough trouble making network printer configuration as effortless as PrinterLogic does, deprioritizing print auditing and the detailed insight you need to carry out infrastructure consolidation as a result.

 

Get advanced reporting and insights into print activity

In addition to making network printer configuration and oversight easier than ever, PrinterLogic SaaS provides advanced management features like print auditing and reporting already built-in. These are the same powerful, comprehensive print auditing capabilities that have given our on-premise customers macro- and micro-level visibility into their print environments, enabling them to carry out cost-saving infrastructure reduction and network printer consolidation. 

In fact, a TechValidate study (TVID: 77B-13B-830) showed that 79% of verified PrinterLogic customers reduced their infrastructure by 30% or more simply by implementing PrinterLogic. And PrinterLogic SaaS delivers those same benefits in a convenient, cost-effective cloud solution.

With PrinterLogic SaaS’s print auditing and reporting capabilities, you can easily determine things like:

  • Which network printers see the heaviest and lightest use
  • How many pages are being printed by user and department on each printer
  • Who is printing the most in different departments 
  • When certain documents are printed, including those that meet certain search criteria
  • What the real-time costs of printing are

This degree of visibility is hard to obtain, even from specialized auditing solutions, as they don’t have the deep-seated, system-level integration that PrinterLogic SaaS does. Not only do you get a window into data related to network printer configuration, such as grayscale, duplexing, and users that initiated print jobs. You’ll even get specific guidance on network printer consolidation from PrinterLogic SaaS.

 

Reduce print hardware and maintenance costs

Because PrinterLogic SaaS is a cloud-based solution, the only local physical print infrastructure you need is your printers. PrinterLogic’s already minimal hardware standards result in an impressive reduction in print-related hardware above and beyond network printer consolidation. That equates to less hardware to purchase, less to operate and maintain, and less to upgrade over the long term. Combined with the time saved through PrinterLogic SaaS’s intuitive network printer configuration, which allows you to easily adjust default settings and deploy printers dynamically without Group Policy Objects (GPOs) or scripts, the potential ROI should be clear.

Factor in a reduction in print-related calls to the service desk, greater flexibility of user access, feature extensibility, and higher print availability, and you’ll see how PrinterLogic offers far more cost savings than network printer consolidation alone.

Curious how much you could save? Try our free print savings calculator. 

 

Ready to try serverless printing?

Long-term projects like infrastructure reduction call for long-term solutions that future-proof your organization. PrinterLogic is just that. We provide a platform that equips you with all the tools you need to scale effectively, including:

  • Pull printing (Secure Release)
  • Off-Network Printing
  • Print Quota Management
  • Multiple IdP Support

All of these features are available in our free 30-day trial so you can get the complete, serverless experience. Learn more about PrinterLogic here. 

Or sign-up for your free 30-day trial today.

 

 

Best Practices When Implementing Centralized Print Management in an Enterprise

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It’s easier to keep track of things when they’re all in one place. That’s why centralized print management is such an important goal for IT teams. However, it can take a lot of work to implement in large organizations with many moving parts like different operating systems, printer models, locations, and user needs.

It’s even more challenging when your infrastructure is working against you. 

Print servers and other prototypical corporate printing solutions don’t allow you to view and manage everything from a single pane of glass. Instead of unifying the print environment, they fragment it.

However, with the right resources, centralized print management is more than just possible—it’s easy to implement. And the long-term payoff can be huge if done correctly. Read on to learn the best practices to implement centralized print management.

 

Eliminate your print servers

More infrastructure doesn’t equal more features and more convenience. This assumption is one of the most common mistakes in print management. It is also one of the leading reasons organizations end up adding print servers when their print environment is underperforming. Which, in turn, only creates more hardware to juggle and increases overall costs. 

And, after the PrintNightmare scare, admins wished they had eliminated print servers instead of adding to their fleet.

Serverless printing infrastructure empowers you to ditch your print servers. That’s because it uses direct IP, which creates one-to-one connections between computers and printers without servers. At the same time, it helps bring the entire print environment together. All of those client/printer relationships are housed under one solution and managed from a single console.

 

Simplify printer deployments and driver maintenance with a single console

If your organization is after centralized print management, chances are you’re looking for a more streamlined print experience for admins and end users. Centralized print management gets you one step closer to simplifying deployments by providing a single console that allows you to deploy printers with just a few clicks and manage your printer drivers from a single repository. 

Admins can add new printers or make changes to existing ones effortlessly. They can even use Active Directory criteria to set up advanced deployments. On the other hand, end users can leverage Self-Service Printer Installation features to install printers by themselves—drastically reducing helpdesk intervention. 

 

Find a scalable solution 

When you think of traditional direct IP printing, the term “scalable” doesn’t usually come to mind. But server-based corporate printing solutions aren’t very scalable either. To scale up, they always call for more infrastructure. Otherwise, performance goes downhill.

A serverless printing infrastructure enables print environments to become incredibly scalable. Even ones that are growing. If you open or acquire a new location, you can import its printers automatically. There is no need to airdrop another print server to service a new office. 

 

Prioritize print security

Protecting your printers has become as commonplace as locking your door before you leave the house. It’s more than necessary. And you don’t want your property to get stolen. 

So, how do you keep threats out of your print environment? 

It’s simple. Require your users to have a key (password) to be allowed inside. 

When you eliminate your print servers and move to cloud printing, you open the door to integrations with IdPs, which mandate users to verify their identity before giving them access to necessary applications—including printing. On top of that, serverless print management offers advanced security features like pull printing, requiring a second layer of authentication before print jobs are released. 

 

Consider your sustainability goals

Businesses are doing all they can to create a more sustainable workplace, not just in terms of future growth, but also making an intentional effort to lower consumable usage to help the environment. Printing is, of course, a great place to start. 

Centralizing your print environment by eliminating your print servers does wonders for your sustainability initiatives in a few ways, including:

  • Reducing the amount of electricity used by print servers
  • Removing unused printers from your print fleet
  • Providing features like pull printing to create intentional printing habits
  • Setting limits on maximum print job size to cut back on paper usage
  • Tracking and auditing print jobs to calculate print costs per user, group, and department

And these are just the basics. 

Sure, you could just ask people to print less, restrict access to most printers, and cross your fingers that they’ll print duplex. However, serverless printing gives you control over what end users can do and provides the features and functionality to make sustainable printing almost automatic. 

 

Get proven results with SaaS print management 

Moving to a serverless print management solution allows admins to eliminate print servers and get centralized print management on a single platform. 

Take our customer, Aquafin, for example. 

This large Belgian wastewater specialist first went from hundreds of Novell IP printers to four Windows print servers. Then, it migrated again to PrinterLogic’s fully serverless printing infrastructure. At each step of the way, our solution helped Aquafin apply best practices and get optimal results. Read the case study here.

Large or small, your organization can do the same. Schedule a demo of PrinterLogic today and get a 30-day free trial to discover how quickly and seamlessly you can achieve centralized print management in your print environment.

Serverless Printing and the Modern Digital Workplace with AWS

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Together with leaders from Amazon Web Services, we’ve examined what a modern print management solution looks like.

IT needs a solution that meets the demands of a modern digital workplace. Modern print management should support every OS and printer manufacturer. It should also support modern identity and access management technologies. If it checks those boxes, all while keeping printing on the local network, you’ve got a winner. 

PrinterLogic’s AWS-hosted SaaS offering is a true SaaS solution. In this blog, we’ll cover:

  • How PrinterLogic SaaS integrates with AWS to deliver modern serverless print management
  • How the AWS Digital Workplace provides an ecosystem of secure and collaborative solutions
  • How to support printing in Zero Trust environments and flexible workplaces

But first, let’s define and discuss the four tenets of a serverless printing infrastructure.

 

What is a serverless printing infrastructure?

Implementing a serverless printing infrastructure means eliminating print server architecture and utilizing a cloud-based solution to manage, track, and deploy printers. Along with eliminating print servers, serverless printing helps IT teams centralize their print environment, providing admins with a bird’s-eye view of all printer objects, drivers, and users across distributed office locations.

Companies are striving to remove infrastructure faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model built in the cloud by 2026. And SaaS print management plays a vital role in any organization’s digital transformation. Moving from on-prem, physical resources to cloud-based solutions is critical to any digital workplace transformation.  

 

The four tenets of a serverless printing infrastructure

So, what exactly are the requirements of a serverless printing infrastructure? PrinterLogic CTO Corey Ercanbrack maintains that there are four, which we’ll highlight and describe below.

 

A modern SaaS architecture

Implementing SaaS-based solutions removes the need for expensive VPNs. VPN failures create bottlenecks. Not to mention, legacy systems require constant IT intervention, including security patches and upgrades to keep your hardware up-to-date. 

The immutability and microservices ingrained in SaaS solutions are critical components that allow for fully automated environmental scalability. These also prevent problematic breakdowns. These components, along with multi-tenancy, allow for speedy updates and delivery of services as they become available. Print jobs must stay local in the user domain, leveraging a direct IP protocol. In short, SaaS architectures encourage a better security posture and eliminate single points of failure.

 

IT infrastructure integrations

Ask more significant questions that take into account your IT roadmap as a whole. It’s bigger than users, printers, and print servers. It helps to think about WAN, BYOD, virtualization/DaaS, IdPs, and how to print across operating systems and multifunction printers. 

Ask yourself, “What will my printing infrastructure look like years from now? And, what steps can I take to future-proof it?” Consider how your print environment will integrate with business analytics platforms and other business intelligence software to drive you toward a fully digital workplace.

 

User-based security

One important consideration should be the path of print data. Direct IP printing provides better security since print jobs are sent directly from the workstation to the printer. 

Combining localized print jobs with Secure Release Printing and multi-factor authentication (MFA) features is integral to preventing print data loss. Open Identity Access Management dictates that the user is more important than the device. Auditable Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) allows for compliance and an improved security posture. These all align with existing infrastructure integrations.

 

Off-Network/Zero Trust printing

The fourth tenet of a serverless printing infrastructure is to keep print jobs local. With this in mind, consider other BYOD flexibility challenges. How can you deliver print functionality when the MFP in front of a user is on a different network? To access that service, you would need an external service available via a public internet connection and a local encrypted secure tunnel, creating hoops for IT to jump through just to maintain security. 

Serverless printing should extend Zero Trust printing capabilities to hybrid employees by empowering them to print securely to any network printer, regardless of their location. Authorized off-network users simply verify their identities via IdP, access the SaaS application, and select the network printer they wish to print to. In this scenario, all jobs remain encrypted until they reach the desired printer. This eliminates the need to print confidential documents to unsecure home office printers. 

 

Print management in the modern digital workplace

Now that we’ve defined the requirements of a serverless printing infrastructure, let’s look a little more closely at how AWS makes it possible. 

The AWS Digital Workplace delivers an ecosystem of secure and collaborative solutions. Kristen Escobar, Global Segment Lead for Digital Workplace at AWS, explains why: “When we say ‘Digital Workplace’…We are talking about the technology and the services required to support the end user daily, allowing them to work securely from anywhere on any device.”

“Work anywhere on any device.”

This statement may be poignant for IT pros. As employees slowly return to the office, there’s more interest in dynamic workplace models like hoteling and hot desking, creating a demand for BYOD support. Those new models create new challenges for IT and possibly for those who show up late to the office.

 

What makes a modern digital workplace?

Technology users today are either consuming, creating, or manipulating content. They do this either individually or in collaboration with others. And it’s possible only with a device and an application. 

The digital workplace defines the functions and mechanisms required to get the content to the user while enabling interactive collaboration and communication in a secure and accessible way. 

When we look at developing a truly digital workplace, three key areas stand out:

  • Endpoint management
  • Application management
  • Collaboration

The digital workplace identifies solutions that manage these components effortlessly. It provides a simple-to-use and practical remote work or remote learning environment. 

It’s important to note that we are not looking at the business applications themselves. Instead, we are looking at the mechanisms by which these applications are delivered, managed, and secured for remote users.

The combination of these principles and control operations allows us to define the function of a product or service. AWS has made it easy for PrinterLogic to provision a very secure, brand-new instance of their software. In a matter of minutes, it allows a defined printer object to be silently deployed across all operating systems.

 

Better Together: PrinterLogic SaaS + AWS

Since the beginning, PrinterLogic has shouted from the mountaintops to “eliminate your print servers.” In 2016, that message got louder when PrinterLogic and AWS partnered together. 

The goal? Deliver a true SaaS solution to enterprise printing. 

Since then, PrinterLogic and AWS have combined forces to leverage the following technologies and deliver a seamless print management experience:

 

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Amazon Simple Queue Service is a fully managed message queuing service that helps you decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS removes the complexity and overhead of operating message-oriented middleware and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work.

 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 removes the need to invest in hardware upfront. This allows you to develop and deploy applications faster. You can use EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need. You can configure security, networking, and manage storage. 

Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity. This flexibility means you can reduce your need to forecast traffic.

 

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. It combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales. 

It delivers high performance and availability with these several features:

  • Up to 15 low-latency read replicas
  • Point-in-time recovery
  • Continuous backup to Amazon S3
  • Replication across three Availability Zones (AZs)

PrinterLogic and AWS add incredible reliability and continuous delivery for print management. PrinterLogic SaaS is built on microservices that customers don’t have to patch or upgrade. They can reap the benefits of the new service as it comes online.

With PrinterLogic’s platform leveraging these technologies, IT departments everywhere can celebrate. Gone are the days of hearing, “The print server is down, and we can’t print.” 

With increased printer uptime and productivity, you might actually miss your end users a little bit. 

 

Highly available print management built for the future

PrinterLogic, combined with the power of AWS, can help you take a big step toward digital transformation. You can say goodbye to legacy, on-prem infrastructure. A modern print management solution is possible with PrinterLogic SaaS and AWS. 

PrinterLogic is available on the AWS marketplace and offers a 30-day, fully supported free trial of the software after trying a demo. 

Request a free demo and 30-day trial of PrinterLogic SaaS today.

Webinar Recap: Printonomics

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Remember your last math class? 

You thought none of it would apply to your future career, and then, low and behold, you’re managing hundreds of printers and sweating bullets trying to track print costs.

This is particularly true for IT teams with complex, distributed print environments where quantifying cost, efficiency, and consumable waste seems like advanced calculus. 

Luckily, we hosted a webinar called Printonomics to help IT pros like you identify the actual costs of printing and turn what was once a complex math equation into simple subtraction. 

Watch the recording below or read on for a quick event summary. 

 

 

Printing Is Costing You Money

Everything has a price. But when it comes to printing, it’s not just about the cost of consumables like paper and ink; it’s the hardware, loss of productivity, and security vulnerabilities that exponentially drive up costs. 

And, if you want to really point the finger, your print servers are the main culprit for higher print costs. We highlighted a few reasons why:

  • Single point of failure: Printing stops when print servers stop.
  • Deployment overhead: Failed scripts and GPOs lead to more helpdesk tickets, meaning more money out of your company’s pocket. 
  • Maintenance and patches: IT pros dedicate a lot of time to maintenance and security patches—especially when spooler vulnerabilities are exploited.
  • Security vulnerabilities: The average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million—a number that has risen by 15.3% since 2020.  

Even with a perfect track record: Zero vulnerabilities, no failures, and no failed deployments, Quorcirca still estimates that companies spend around $3400 yearly per print server. 

Truth be told, the odds of having a perfect year of printing are the same as winning the lottery.   

 

Printing Is Costing You Time

Time is money in the eyes of an organization. And when IT teams constantly spend time on print-related issues, your company could argue they’d rather invest money in your team tackling mission-critical objectives—not printing. 

But which areas of printing does IT spend the most time on?

According to one study, IT teams spend an average of seven hours on print-related tickets per 100 calls. On top of stacks of helpdesk tickets, IT teams find themselves stuck spending time reacting to low consumables, pulling print reports from various OS and manufacturers, and updating printer drivers.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to reduce time spent on print management. Our experts identified a few modern solutions that help you erase tedious troubleshooting tasks from your agenda, including:

  • Self-service printing
  • Real-time printer alerts
  • Automated reports
  • Customized and automated deployments
  • A dedicated printer driver repository

We’ll talk more about how you can implement these later, but these solutions also help you address sustainability initiatives, which we cover in the next section.

 

Saving Through Sustainability

Sustainability has become a must for companies building for future success. Gartner found that 80% of business leaders see sustainability as a strategic play to optimize and reduce costs. 

Sustainable printing, however, has been a proverbial thorn in the side of IT. Ninety percent of North American companies are unaware of how many printers they have. Without a clear view of how many printers you have, it’s fair to assume those companies don’t know how much they are wasting. Formstack notes around 30% of print jobs never leave the print tray, and 45% of documents are trashed by the end of the day. 

So, what steps can companies take to start printing more responsibly? Here are a few tips:

  • Centralize your print environment to learn what you have in your ecosystem.
  • Track print jobs based on user, group, and department to determine your consumption.
  • Set quotas based on cost or volume to discourage unnecessary, large print jobs.
  • Add an authentication step for each print job with pull printing functionality.

These tips fall under the same umbrella of creating intentional printing habits. Once you have these practices and features established, that’s when the savings start to trickle in. You’ll see paper and ink consumption drop, users will become more aware of what they are printing, and confidential documents won’t sit in the print tray.

 

Addition by Subtraction

How do you add value to your team through subtraction? 

The solution is simple: Eliminate your print servers.

PrinterLogic helps you cut costs and reclaim the time you’ve lost by moving your printer objects from print servers to our centralized, cloud-native platform. Admins can deploy printers without GPOs, track print jobs, and empower end users to install printers themselves from a single UI. Moreover, our solution leverages direct IP printing to keep jobs on the local network, eliminating spooler vulnerabilities for good. 

 

See How Much You Can Save

Want to put a number on your potential cost savings after eliminating your print servers?

We’ve developed a formula to help you calculate your print savings by answering eight simple questions about your current print environment.

Try our free print savings calculator now.