How Centralized Print Administration Helps Tighten Control and Security for Corporate Printing

It’s tempting to think of corporate security mostly in terms of locking things down: restricting access, closing loopholes, patching vulnerabilities. Those are the necessary steps you take to reduce potential exploits before they happen.

Another crucial aspect of security is oversight. That’s a more active, interventional way to catch suspicious activity.

To give an example, your car has locks on its doors. But those locks don’t care who’s using the keys. The pivotal moment comes when an observer says, “Hey, that’s Jeff’s car. So why is that stranger unlocking it? I’d better figure out what’s going on.”

The same applies to corporate printing. An employee might have perfectly legitimate access to a certain printer. Yet, if you notice them printing unusually large jobs at odd hours, something could definitely be amiss. That’s where oversight comes into play.

Through centralized print administration, your organization can get the unified oversight it needs to create a more efficient and secure printing environment. Centralization doesn’t just tighten control. It also offers easier print monitoring in even the most distributed organizations.

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure allows you to centralize print administration in your organization while eliminating print servers at the same time. That means more oversight with less infrastructure.

How does our next-gen enterprise software do this? By moving beyond traditional approaches to corporate printing. Instead of relying on print servers to do the heavy lifting, PrinterLogic establishes direct IP connections between clients and printers. The web-based admin console then lets authorized IT staff manage all of those printer objects and settings from a single pane of glass.

Using the console, admins can update (or roll back) drivers and configure changes directly on user endpoints. With print servers eliminated, those changes can be carried out in real time. Furthermore, printing is more robust when it’s based on direct IP, and centralized management makes the entire environment feel much more cohesive—even if it’s a broad mix of printers and client devices.

In addition to its powerful admin console, PrinterLogic also offers advanced reporting. This is a print auditing and monitoring feature that increases visibility over the entire corporate printing environment.

Advanced reporting enhances centralized print administration by keeping tabs on things like print job metadata and SNMP status. That information gives admins a better understanding of how often printers are being used and for what. They can see details right down to the user and printer level.

What’s more, PrinterLogic makes that data accessible as well as actionable. Print job metadata can be integrated with your organization’s existing BI tools, and information on consumables usage or print activity can be emailed to department heads and decision-makers at specified intervals. You can use it to curb wasteful printing or as the basis for a secure printing initiative.

Of course, any secure printing initiative ought to include secure release printing. The Secure Print Analysis report from HP found that almost 90 percent of enterprise businesses have suffered at least one data loss because of unsecured printing. Secure release printing helps to combat data loss by adding an authentication step to some or all print jobs.

PrinterLogic makes it super easy for organizations to incorporate that into their corporate printing strategy. Any network printer—even legacy devices—can be configured for secure release printing in PrinterLogic’s admin control. And for even more convenience, there’s the option to use multiple release methods: PrinterLogic’s Print Release App, badge/card release, the printer’s control panel and more.

Iowa’s Northwest Area Education Agency (AEA) turned to PrinterLogic SaaS when it wanted a single cloud-based solution that would do all of the above. That meant centralizing print administration, leveraging advanced reporting and implementing secure printing in a mixed-OS environment.

With print servers and conventional direct IP, those targets were impossible. But with PrinterLogic, Northwest AEA was able to hit every one of them. The organization now has more oversight and more control over its print environment—but with far less investment of time and resources in day-to-day print administration. You can read the case study here.