In tech circles there’s a lot of excitement about the cloud these days. And rightly so. Cloud computing makes it possible to divest your organization of costly physical infrastructure while providing more flexibility to your workforce. At the same time, cloud-based initiatives such as enterprise cloud printing have a key requirement that might be a deal-breaker for some organizations.
What requirement is that exactly? Dependence on the WAN.
With most enterprise cloud print software, print jobs must be routed via a remote server. That means the local print job travels across the WAN to the cloud printing hub, which then relays it back across the WAN to the local printer. Even though the two endpoint devices might not be more than ten or twenty feet away from one another, the print job is forced to make multiple network hops and travel offsite.
This reliance on the WAN has three significant drawbacks:
It introduces a single point of failure. If the WAN connection is interrupted in any way, cloud printing is halted across the organization. An organization will either need to invest in expensive always-on failover strategies or it will have to brace itself for the inevitable flood of support calls and loss of productivity when the WAN fails.
It exacerbates WAN bottlenecks. On account of its finite bandwidth, the WAN connection already acts like a constraint on network traffic. When data-hungry print jobs are regularly traveling across the WAN, the available bandwidth for other applications shrinks. This can mean slower browsing and choppier communications if you’re using some form of VoIP solution.
It can result in slower printing. Even if the WAN is functioning normally and network traffic is relatively light, the fact that your enterprise cloud print software routes every print job along this long, WAN-dependent path increases the likelihood that your end users will have a slower cloud printing experience.
Because this dependence on the WAN is unavoidable for the vast majority of enterprise cloud printing solutions, these shortcomings tend to come with the territory.
But not with PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).
PrinterLogic SaaS is a next-generation enterprise cloud printing solution that leverages the same underlying direct IP paradigm as its on-premises counterpart, PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer). Direct IP printing enables PrinterLogic SaaS to establish point-to-point connections between clients and printers, so a WAN connection is no longer necessary when cloud printing. End users click “Print” from their clients and the print job travels across the local network to the printer—the shortest, fastest, most reliable route.
In addition to eliminating the single point of failure associated with the WAN, PrinterLogic SaaS eliminates those other long-standing single points of failure: print servers. By implementing PrinterLogic SaaS, you can realize all the anticipated benefits of cloud printing by reducing your traditional print infrastructure to almost nil. No more server migrations, server upgrades and server maintenance. Ever.
And not only will you enjoy the freedom of a simplified print environment, you’ll also enjoy the freedom of simplified print management. PrinterLogic SaaS allows you to deploy printers reliably and accurately to users without using cumbersome GPOs and scripts to do so.
With PrinterLogic SaaS, you can also provide your users with advanced functionality like Mobile Printing and Pull Printing. These sought-after features are usually only available from additional third-party vendors with other enterprise cloud printing solutions, but our cloud printing and print management solution offers them as native features.
If you’ve been taking a “wait and see” approach to cloud printing until now, your wait is over. PrinterLogic SaaS is revolutionary enterprise cloud print software that lets you declare your independence from the WAN while providing more features, more scalability and more ease of use than even on-premises print management solutions can claim.