Three Ways to Make Printing More Reliable

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General office printing requires reliability and availability, so in-office and remote employees can continue their work. A direct IP printing model works well–it relies on a direct connection from the workstation to the printer without using the Internet. Even if an Internet outage occurs, printing continues.

But you’re not only managing general office printing. Your organization integrates many core business processes with electronic record and resource applications that store, manage, and generate documentation. This is especially prevalent in the healthcare industry with electronic health and medical record systems managing all patient information with physicians and nurses needing access to distribute care accurately. 

Your print servers are heavily tied to these vital business processes, intercepting spooled print jobs from the source application and distributing them to the printer or channel they need to go to. 

Consider an output management software.

Output management software either works with your print servers or replaces them entirely. It sits between the source application and your printers to facilitate communication. This software automates, manages, and distributes output from any source application to multiple channels, either physically or digitally. 

Here are three ways we suggest improving the reliability and efficiency of your output processes using output management software: 

1. Confirmed delivery of print jobs

Printers on their own don’t give you all the information you need about the status of your print jobs. Most of the time, it’ll tell you it received the job, then radio silence. If your batch print job of 50 documents made it to page 35 on the first document before stopping, and it’s not a lack of paper or ink, you aren’t sure how to diagnose the issue. Or worse, you’re unaware of any issue until missing invoices, shipping forms, and contract pages grind everything to a halt. 

Output management software often provides bidirectional communication as part of the print job’s journey. It’s extra assurance and confidence that your print jobs and output processes were delivered where they need to go. These updates could also tell you what page the job failed on and what issue occurred, giving you the chance to address the issue immediately without hours of troubleshooting. 

2. Redundant, low-footprint infrastructure

Using a Windows, Linux, or Unix print server offers load-balancing and clustering as long as it’s configured and maintained properly, but often operates as a single point of failure if the servers crash from any kind of software or network issue, printing can’t continue, which, of course, is a detrimental interruption to your processes and workflows. 

Output management software doesn’t have to run on a print server. Some use a service client–a low-footprint client that performs similarly to a print server but is much simpler to spin up and maintain redundant instances, eliminating the single points of failure. Print jobs are spooled and received by a service client, load-balanced to the redundant clients, processed, and distributed simultaneously. With significantly less effort and maintenance, your processes can easily scale with your organization’s demands and speed. 

3. Rules-based automation 

With the advancements in machine learning and robotic process automation in recent years, automation should be introduced in some form for your document processes. Automation can save employees three hours a day, roughly 30 hours a month, eliminating manual touchpoints such as converting individual files to PDFs for printing or reprinting if print jobs fail.

Setting rules that automatically perform specific actions when certain triggers and conditions are met significantly reduces, if not totally eliminates, manual tasking. One popular case is if a print job fails due to an unavailable printer, it automatically redirects to an available backup printer to complete the job successfully. Compounding with the hundreds of documents and outputs processed daily, this simple redirect rule significantly extends your environment’s value and reliability. 


Vasion’s Output Management solution has the reliability you’re looking for. 

Replace your Windows, Linux, or Unix print servers in your environment with a much more reliable and highly available Output Management solution that ensures any output makes it from your source applications where it needs to go, in the format it needs to be in, and when it needs to be there. The solution is backed by a robust feature set that ensures reliability at every stage:

 

If your organization manages multiple 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. 

Schedule a demo today.

How to Adopt Zero Trust Printing

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If someone were to tell you you should be scared of your printers, you’d likely laugh in their face. While clunky, they aren’t exactly an intimidating adversary. What everyone doesn’t know is that printers pose a huge, costly threat to your organization.

Printers connected to your corporate network are a wide attack vector for hackers. Along with being an entryway into your business’s network, hackers are able to attack other applications and launch ransomware through a compromised printer, wreaking havoc on your organization. 

According to this print security report by Quocirca, over two-thirds (68%) of organizations have experienced data losses due to unsecured printing practices in the past 12 months, leading to an average of $770,000 per data breach.

Since the need for printers remains high in the workplace, companies must pivot from traditional security measures towards Zero Trust printing in order to protect company data. 

 

Understanding Zero Trust

Before jumping off the deep end, it’s important to understand the basics. A Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA) is a completely new approach to traditional network models. The structure as a whole is based on one principle: Never trust, always verify.

Traditional Network: This model inherently trusts anyone inside their network’s perimeter and is protected through a single verification point (typically a basic password based on an employee’s pet). 

Zero Trust Network: A security model in which no device is trusted by default, and users must be continually authenticated, authorized, and validated before being allowed access to applications and data, whether they are inside or outside the organization’s network.

Traditional networks are no longer safe because once any endpoint inside the network is compromised, attackers can move laterally and gain access to anything else on that network. Within a  Zero Trust network, access is limited, which is one of the most critical pieces of an effective Zero Trust strategy since most cyberattacks are internal and, more often than not, accidental.

 

Strengthening Your Network Security

Remote work is here to stay. While employees enjoy the conveniences of not commuting to an office, IT departments are flailing to put in place the robust back-end infrastructures needed to protect organizations’ data amid the transition. 

As employees use their own home printers for company printing, this poses two potential attack surfaces for hackers:

  1. An unsecured machine connected to a company computer. Connecting a company computer to an unsecured home printer provides a gateway past any VPN or security. Once a hacker moves from the printer to the company drive, they can gain access to the company’s primary network.

  2. Information is stored on the printer’s hard drive. Printer hard drives store previously queued print jobs for a varying degree of time. Hackers are able to break into these hard drives using a back door to view sensitive company information by accessing the employee’s home Wi-Fi.

Organization’s using a traditional network model don’t stand a chance against these threats. However, shifting to a Zero Trust approach means avoiding these types of vulnerabilities altogether by eliminating outdated infrastructure, like print servers, and going serverless. This reduces attack surfaces, strengthens security for remote workers, provides threat detection and prevention, and allows companies more visibility into print activity overall. 

 

Investing in Print Security 

Now that you understand the time to transition to a Zero Trust printing architecture is now, it’s important to select the right print management solution for your organization. The best possible solution will check these four critical boxes:

✔ Access and identity management

✔ Authentication for all connections and endpoints

✔ Segmentation of data to limit harm from breaches

✔ Simple, secure management features

PrinterLogic inherently checks off every box and possesses the necessary tools for your Zero Trust Printing environment. You can finally address your organization’s needs with a scalable solution that offers round-the-clock network protection and unlocks the true potential of your document and print management processes. 

 


Ready to see what Zero Trust Printing from PrinterLogic can do for you? Schedule a demo today. 

How API Printing is the Missing Puzzle Piece for Your Environment

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You may be familiar with printing protocols such as Line Printer Daemon Protocol (LPR) or Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) when communicating with servers and clients. These industry-standard protocols are widely used for most printing processes and provide a secure connection for print data all the to the printer tray. 


Closer Look at What LPR and IPP Printing Protocols Are and Do

Line Printer Daemon (LPR) has a very strict communication standard, and a majority of all printers support this protocol, as defined in RFC 1179. Due to its widespread support and well-defined parameters, it can be easy to lean towards when needing to print over the network as a default printing connection.

Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) is a communication protocol–its name explains what it does: facilitating printing over the Internet. IPP requests use the hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) and can support HTTPS (becoming IPPS), alleviating security concerns. In contrast to LPR, it also supports strong error messages and modern features of the printer. IPP Everywhere came a few versions later, allowing printing from any device–being “driverless”–regardless of vendor-specific software. 


Going One Step Further  

You’ve got your standard print communication down with LPR and IPP protocols. But when you need to connect your printers with custom software in your organization, like web-based line-of-business applications that don’t have a native printing connection into a seamless printing process, you need a customizable, simple solution to make that possible. 


Introducing API Printing: The Piece to the Puzzle 

Printing with an API connection bridges the gap with flexibility and customizability when printing from web-based applications without native printing capabilities. As well as being extremely lightweight with no need for physical print server hardware, API printing gives you that extra control over your print jobs, making it a necessary printing connection to introduce into your environment. 

1. APIs are customizable to your organization’s applications

Within PrinterLogic’s Output Management bundle, the API Print Service connects any web-based system, not natively equipped to communicate with printing protocols but can make requests over the Internet with your existing print management solution or directly with your office printers–all driverless and strong security measures built in. A few of these integrations include:

  • Salesforce and other CRMs
  • Point-of-sale and line-of-business systems
  • Custom kiosks
  • Batch printing daily routes and tasks (to be talked more about in a future blog)!

2. API calls make sending print jobs simple

Sending a print job through the API Print Service is as easy as performing an HTTP call, for example:

const formData = new FormData();

formData.append("queue", "HP127");

formData.append("jobID", "96e31686-daae-4820-9389-5a9d36496bad");

formData.append("deviceName", "m123.local");

formData.append("paperSource", "1");

formData.append("username", "john.doe@vasion.com");

formData.append("statusURL", "https://example.com/print-job-status");

fetch("https://print-server:31990/v1/print", {

method: "POST",

headers: {

    "accept": "application/json",

},

body: formData,

})

.then(response => response.json())

.then(data => console.log(data))

.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

It’s that easy. The API code establishes the connection between your application and printers, acting as that puzzle piece you need to unify your processes. We’ve defined the implementation of the schema in our documentation for more information. 


3. API printing creates a seamless Output Management experience

And after the API makes the connection, PrinterLogic Output Management handles the rest, sending the document to the correct printer, rendering it to a format the printer can handle as needed, and reporting the status after success (or failure). Output Management combines the advantages of both LPR and IPP into a simple API post request that is secure and performant. 

Output Management can provide your organization with the modern tools and automation necessary to ensure output from any system is delivered where it needs to go, in the format it needs to be in, and when it needs to be there. You get more granular control over printing with rules-based document routing, EMR/ERP connections, and High Availability–all to unify your systems and increase efficiency. 


If you’re interested in API printing and our Output Management solution to facilitate printing with your businesses’ applications, visit our website and schedule a demo today. Our Output Management team is available to discuss your needs and goals and your organization’s automation initiatives.