Enterprise Printing Risks and Creating a Secure Printing Environment

Among IT professionals, it’s no secret that printers represent a security threat. The research firm Quocirca surveyed 400 IT decision makers in the United States and Europe, and found 56% reported at least one data loss in the past year. According to their 2023 report, the average cost of a print-related data breach is £743,000 (approximately $994,847 USD).

With that price tag, the importance of secure print management and secure printing can’t be overstated. Even in a time of digitization, printers are ubiquitous in a business environment. Their widespread use and the difficulty of managing them present unique security challenges, but those are not insurmountable.

Printers are among the most widely used devices in any organization. Regardless of your preferred printing solutions, printers are accessed by every de partment, every employee, and even automated systems. That constant, widespread access increases the security risks surrounding sensitive documents.

Yet the need for constant, widespread access also makes the print environment tough to lock down. Print management is hard enough without all kinds of additional security measures in place. If you do try to implement more secure printing, end users who find themselves inconvenienced are either going to pester the helpdesk or, worse, find a (non-secure) workaround.

For IT admins, that seems like a lose-lose scenario.

Preserving the status quo is the path of least resistance, yet it leaves the print environment vulnerable. On the other hand, increasing print security using conventional printing solutions is bound to create more print management overhead. It’s also likely to leave end users unhappy or compel them to undermine the security you’ve worked so hard to implement.

The bottom line is this: No matter what the challenges, sidelining print security just isn’t an option. The costs of data breaches are huge, and the exposure vectors are everywhere:

• Human error: Employees frequently print documents and then forget to retrieve them, leaving sensitive information in the output tray for anyone to see—or take to a competitor.

• Outdated print architectures: Legacy printing solutions like print servers store print jobs in a common queue. If hackers gain access to the queue, they gain access to every job in it.

• Halfhearted security measures: Print security is all or nothing. Any loophole will be exploited. But that also means admins have an obligation to make secure printing a natural, seamless part of their end users’ workflows.

It takes next-generation print management software to overcome longstanding, universal shortcomings like these.

Secure Release Printing from Vasion Print leverages the strengths of our serverless printing infrastructure to be simple to deploy and manage, user-friendly, and cost-effective. This eliminates print servers and all their vulnerabilities while enhancing ease of use for admins and end users.

With Vasion Print, pretty much any networked printer can be turned into a secure release printer. If you have an existing badge or ID card swipe system, Vasion can easily integrate with your hardware readers to release secure print jobs. Alternatively, users can authenticate using the printer’s embedded control panel or our Mobile App for iOS and Android smartphones.

Secure print protects proprietary information, which can make or break a company’s compliance. In a healthcare setting, secure print helps protect patient information. “Secure Release Printing will make it easier for us to be compliant with the PHI and HIPAA regulations,” said Saber Healthcare Sr. Systems Engineer Adam Dishong. “By having security features to protect patient information, we’ll be able to reduce the size of our fleet and ask end users to walk around the corner to pick up their print job.”

Leave the flaws of traditional printing solutions behind and see what Vasion’s secure printing can do for your organization.