Going beyond dollars to include real vulnerabilities and risks for the business, these traditional print management costs typically spring from one of the following five sources.
1. Print Servers
In traditional print management where businesses rely on physical, on-premise print servers to manage queues, their environments become increasingly unscalable, complex, and hard to maintain.
“Most businesses’ environments are still on legacy infrastructure,” Devin explained. “That's print servers. That's a climate-controlled room for each print server. That’s hiring people to manage those server rooms.”
As these environments become more complex, costs rise in terms of maintenance, the physical space the servers occupy, the energy to power them, and the IT personnel to manage them.
Any time a new printer or user is introduced, it falls to the IT team to manually install drivers and configure queues on the physical server—a process that is anything but scalable. As if this were not a large enough burden for IT, they must also manage driver compatibility, printer mapping, security for all the different locations, and server maintenance. Too often, these ongoing IT resource- and hardware maintenance-related costs remain invisible to the organization.
Ultimately, these costs add up to figures that have a real negative impact on companies’ bottom lines. For example, in organizations with 1,000-plus employees, the annual cost of acquiring and managing print servers reaches an average of $222,900.2 IDC research shows that, on average, organizations spend 3.7% of the overall IT budget on print servers and related costs.3
2. Multiple Systems, Multiple Vendors
In traditional print management, organizations tend to inadvertently accumulate a mixture of hardware brands and varying, disparate management software platforms. For each printer brand, this essentially creates a different ecosystem that requires its own user interfaces, drivers, and support contracts. More importantly, it makes standardization and centralized control across all printers virtually impossible.
This prevents organizations from getting their arms around their most fundamental metrics, like total print costs, or properly enforcing policies to manage printing behaviors. From there, costs quickly get out of control. Actual printing expenses increase and toner and paper costs rise, but organizations lack the data to identify the source of these issues, much less correct the problem.
This lack of visibility becomes especially risky for organizations when it comes to print-related regulatory and compliance issues. In industries where organizations are supposed to maintain printed versions of certain critical documents to provide to auditors and regulators, those with decentralized print environments run the risk of costly fines and heavy penalties.
For example, failure to comply with GDPR regulations in the European Union can result in fines to the tune of tens of millions of euros. HIPAA fines in the U.S. can set a company back hundreds of thousands of dollars, while fines in the financial services industry have been known to reach tens of millions of dollars.
3. Limited Security
One of the biggest vulnerabilities posed by traditional print management can be found in the printer tray. Lacking any kind of user authentication, as soon as the user clicks ‘print’, the document goes directly to a printer to be produced, whether or not the user is present at the machine to ensure that the document’s contents are treated with proper discretion.
Too often, copies of confidential materials—think financial data or medical records—can sit fully exposed in a printer tray for an extended period of time. In the meantime, passersby can view this sensitive information or even swipe the entire document for themselves.
In addition, traditional print management’s reliance on multiple systems and vendors makes it difficult for organizations to track who is printing sensitive files or when. This, in turn, stymies the organization’s ability to detect, investigate, or prevent insider data leaks.
Finally, traditional print management setups are more prone to attacks via vulnerabilities like PrintNightmare, which allowed attackers to remotely execute code and enabled unauthorized users to take full control of systems. Print servers are a major attack surface, best mitigated by getting rid of them altogether.
The consequences of such data leaks, breaches, and attacks can range from minor operational hiccups to catastrophic business failure, including significant reputational damage and identity theft for individuals. Immediate financial loss is also a major risk: IDC's research indicates that the average cost of a print-related security breach is $658,000.4
Perhaps even more devastating is the long-term costs that result from the customer attrition, operational downtime, and loss of competitive advantage that such security breaches can bring.
4. IT Team Supervision
Few teams feel the cost of traditional print management as much as IT does. Between jams, driver errors, and connectivity problems, these teams are hit by a constant barrage of printer-related help desk tickets.
Combine that with the time these teams must devote to managing inconsistent drivers across different printer brands and operating systems and installing, patching, and managing print servers, and IT teams have little to no time to focus on the strategic initiatives that would actually allow their operations to run more effectively or reduce costs.
Ultimately, with traditional print management organizations pay more and more for IT support overhead, only to find themselves with more reactive fixes, burnout, and backlogs.
5. Combination of Print and Digital
While digital transformation has easily, naturally transitioned so much analog media into a digital equivalent, printed documents have resisted this transition. Individuals and organizations hold tight to printing certain documents in certain cases.
One of these cases is signing documents. The aforementioned 2025 Document Process Survey from IDC found that over 46% of respondents still print documents with the express purpose of getting them physically signed; nearly 44% are required to do so by their company.5
Whether it’s printing emails and spreadsheets for the sake of record-keeping or printing reports to suit the preferences of a director or executive, these practices are ingrained in the way companies do business.
“Print is still very much a needed thing in many, many industries, and we're not going to get away from that overnight,” Devin observed. “This means we have physical processes, and we have digital processes. Physical and digital documents are living together in most organizations.”
However, these parallel approaches prevent companies from getting a complete picture of how documents are circulating through operations. “Typically, the physical and digital processes are separated,” Devin continued. “They don’t share information between each other.”
This creates gaps in visibility that make it easy for costs to persist and grow out of control. Each hard copy printed creates a potential hole in the organization’s understanding of the document’s journey. This makes it hard to build the kind of powerful, automated workflows that could drive greater efficiency within the business.
Thankfully, none of the traditional print management costs listed above is a foregone conclusion or unsolvable. By adopting new approaches and applying new, commonsense technologies to print operations, organizations can slash the costs of traditional print management and reap the benefits of digital transformation.
