Integrated Identity Services for Enterprise Printing

By 2021, cybersecurity damages are estimated to hit $6 trillion annually. If you were to break down that global tally, you’re looking at an average cost of $3.92 million per data breach—a figure that’s risen by 12% in the past five years alone. The increasing severity and scale of enterprise data breaches has fueled that rise.

Taking a stronger stance on secure printing is one important step toward reducing risk. Organizations have typically been pretty lax in their approach to enterprise printing because they don’t want to inconvenience end users. Heaven knows their IT departments are bound to get an earful if they do.

But when they’re done right, features like secure release printing can harden your print environment and become a seamless part of your end users’ printing workflow. A solution like PrinterLogic can even help you eliminate print servers in the process.

Secure printing usually employs a release mechanism. This means that the end user prints to their desired printer as usual. Then the print job is held until the end user is physically present at the destination printer. Once there, they can authenticate themselves and trigger their print job.

Authentication commonly takes place through either ID card or PIN verification. For one, the end user swipes their card or badge through a hardware reader that’s been paired with the printer. For the other, they input their username and/or PIN on the printer’s control panel. Their credentials are established through identity services like Active Directory.

This adds security to enterprise printing by limiting document exposure. Print jobs don’t end up sitting in the output tray for all to see. And it decreases the chances of end users printing a sensitive document to the wrong printer by accident.

In most organizations, the shortcomings of secure release printing have tended to be limited printer support, weak integration with popular identity services and poor ease of use. PrinterLogic overcomes all those shortcomings.

Thanks to PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure, any network printer can be configured as a secure-release printer. That extends the useful lifespan of legacy devices and saves your organization from having to invest in new enterprise printing hardware.

As a further benefit, PrinterLogic also lets you eliminate print servers. That gets rid of an easy attack vector for malicious actors and saves additional money and headache by removing a major pain point in print management.

Depending on your print environment, end users then have multiple authentication mechanisms to choose from:

• Swiping their badge or ID card

• Using PrinterLogic’s Print Release App on their iOS or Android smartphone

• Entering their credentials on the printer’s control panel

That last one is a particular strength of PrinterLogic. Our new Control Panel Platform puts native PrinterLogic applications on major printer brands throughout the world, making it even easier and faster for end users to authenticate.

As part of the verification and authorization process, PrinterLogic has offered seamless integration with identity services like Active Directory since the very beginning. More recently, our cloud-first enterprise printing solution, PrinterLogic SaaS, added native integration with the future of that platform, Azure AD.

And that’s not all. PrinterLogic SaaS also now supports embedded integration with Okta, the leading cloud-based identity provider (IdP). This blog post has more information on both of those integrations—including the possibilities they open up for further secure printing features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO).

EPIC Management, L.P. is a California-based managed services provider specializing in healthcare. When they wanted to eliminate print servers and implement PHI-compliant secure printing in a challenging Citrix environment, they chose PrinterLogic.

Now their customers’ enterprise printing is reliable and secure, and managing the entire distributed print environment can be done in the “10 seconds before lunch.” Read the case study here.

If you’re looking at minimizing risk through secure printing, you’ll be psyched about our no-risk trial. Sign up today to test all the capabilities of PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure completely free of charge for 30 days.