June 13, 2024

Enterprise Secure Printing Systems: Why You Need Printer Security

Tanner Gage

Not to be confused with pull printing, secure printing has become a household name in the print management industry. Internal document theft is up. The financial damage caused by data breaches is getting harder to swallow. And companies are taking note.

Strengthening document security isn’t just about policies—it’s about closing everyday gaps where sensitive pages can leak, like jobs left in the output tray or files routed through exposed network folders. The right controls reduce print security threats and the risk of a print-related data breach without slowing people down.

What Is Secure Printing?

Secure printing is the process of releasing a print job at a designated printer using one of several authentication methods. Documents are held in a queue until the user is physically present at the printer. Authentication methods vary—from entering an employee PIN to scanning an ID badge or using a mobile application—and can be released only when the user is physically present at the printer. Modern solutions pair secure print release with rigorous access control, so jobs stay in a virtual print queue until the authorized user authenticates.

This is slightly different from its pull printing counterpart. Pull printing allows jobs to be released at any pull printing-enabled network printer. Regardless, secure printing and pull printing offer an additional layer of security that protect confidential documents. But secure printing solutions provide benefits that extend to the remote workforce and help future-proof your print environment.

Common Print Security Threats To Watch

Unclaimed pages in output trays
Open shares/network folders mapped to printers
Weak or shared credentials on multifunction devices
Shadow infrastructure and orphaned print workflows that bypass policy

Enterprise Secure Printing Systems

Enterprise secure printing systems provide robust security and control over your organization’s printing environment. With features like secure release printing, documents are only released after user authentication at the printer. This prevents sensitive information from sitting exposed in output trays. Enterprise-grade platforms centralize secure print management and harden your secure print infrastructure across multifunction printers (MFPs), desktop devices, and print rooms—without adding friction for users.

Comprehensive auditing and tracking capabilities allow you to monitor printing activity across your large organization for compliance purposes. Advanced encryption and secure printing protocols safeguard data as it traverses your network. Built-in firewall protection and policy controls keep traffic inside approved networks and data centers, while granular auditing supports regulated environments.

Centralized printer management streamlines configuration, enables print policy enforcement, and saves IT staff time versus managing individual devices. With the high-volume centralized print centers enterprises require, you can maximize printer uptime and reduce costs.

Enterprise secure printing mitigates risk, bolsters compliance, and enhances operational efficiency–key priorities for any large business that can’t afford data breaches or operational disruptions.

How Can Secure Printing Solutions Benefit You?

Whether you’re an enterprise looking for a secure printing system or an SMB needing a more secure solution to protect your data, the following advice is relevant to both business environments.

They Help You Reduce Legacy Infrastructure

Secure printing solutions aren’t exactly “secure” if you can’t reduce legacy infrastructure. In this case, I’m not talking about your grandfather’s printers.

I’m talking about your print servers. By removing fragile printer server dependencies and moving jobs to the workstation or device, you minimize attack surface while enabling cloud printing options where appropriate.

After the whole PrintNightmare fiasco, it became clear that print servers needed to be wiped from the picture. Secure printing solutions take print servers out of the equation and don’t hold print jobs in a spooler queue. Instead, print jobs are held on the workstation or the printer and remain on the local network until a user is ready to release it. With a virtual print queue, users can route work intelligently and release locally, cutting wait times and eliminating spooler-related failure points.

They Allow Remote Workers To Print Securely

Remote workers need a way to print securely without having to resort to printing on an unmanaged, off-network home printer. Secure printing solutions can give contractors, remote workers, and roaming employees the ability to print to an in-network printer while being on an outside network. Strong mobile device authentication lets contractors and hybrid staff submit securely from phones or laptops and release on site—no unmanaged devices, no exposed shares.

This type of functionality enables end users moving between their homes and offices to print freely and release their documents at the office at their convenience. It encourages employees to stop using home office printers, which are a huge security liability and impossible for admins to track.

Furthermore, secure off-network printing capabilities offer employees a flexible way to deliver confidential documents to someone in the office instead of sending personal or customer information via email.

They Adhere to Zero Trust Standards

Secure printing is a crucial aspect of complying with Zero Trust standards. Zero Trust printing enforces continuous access control with options like two-factor authentication. Users can verify with an employee badge, smart card, or proximity card at the device, so only the right person can release the job. The additional layer of security means confidential information stays in the hands of those who printed it. That level of authentication is a step in the right direction. However, to be considered a Zero Trust-caliber secure printing solution, it has to integrate with the identity providers (IdPs) you use in your environment.

They Give Users Mobile Printing Capabilities

Secure printing capabilities can extend to your end users’ mobile devices. If you’re managing a BYOD environment, leveraging phones, tablets, and laptops to print securely is a great way to simultaneously reduce costs and boost productivity. (This includes secure print workflows for BYOD with per-user policy, quota, and audit trails across your IT environment.) Users can send a print job to a designated printer on the company network and release it later—without having to hop on specific company computers just to print a few documents.

There is a caveat to this one.

Not all secure printing solutions offer 100% compatibility with all printer models and operating systems (this one does). So, make sure to choose a solution that meets the needs of your environment's devices and printers.

They Future-Proof Your Business

Theft isn’t going away. But it’s possible to mitigate it.

Secure printing solutions set you up for future success and reduce the chances of information being exploited for personal gain or a competitive advantage. As part of a broader digital transformation, aligning print to the print lifecycle—from submission to release, retention, and disposition—reduces waste and tightens compliance. They can meet the demands of a hybrid workforce and offer a consistent end-user experience that doesn’t hamper productivity. They enable printing from various mobile devices and are built around maintaining compliance throughout all industries.

And most of all, they take pressure off IT.

Secure Printing Solutions on a Single Platform

One problem with most of the secure printing products on the market is that they require a print server, which means that if your print server goes down, everything ceases to work.

Vasion Print eliminates your print servers and removes the single point of failure while providing a centrally managed direct IP printing platform. It also integrates with leading IdPs for policy-driven secure print management across your fleet. On top of that, VasionPrint is 100% device and OS-agnostic and integrates with all major IdPs.

Vasion Print’s version of secure printing, Secure Release Printing, holds print jobs on the user’s workstation and empowers users to release print jobs using one of the following methods:

Smartphone App/QR Code
Control Panel
Web Browser
Badge reader

Pair release with two-factor authentication to prevent tailgating at busy MFPs.

If you’re benchmarking alternatives such as LRS secure printing or traditional managed print services, ensure they support secure print release, cloud printing, and Zero Trust-ready identity integrations across multifunction devices.

Plus, you'll have access to additional secure printing features, such as Off-Network Printing, Mobile App Release, and concurrent IdP support, to extend the security reach of your print environment.

See firsthand how Vasion Print leverages secure printing features in the cloud and gives you the protection you need in today’s print environments by scheduling a demo.