Three Ways To Reduce Printing Costs

Cutting costs and improving efficiencies are top of mind for any organization. But when it comes time to make changes, reducing printing costs often isn’t at the top of the list. It’s natural to address more prominent expenses like labor, equipment, or workspace facilities first. However, reassessing your organization’s printing process can provide immediate and long-term savings without a huge investment.

Don’t worry, we’re not here to share standard tips like ‘reduce toner usage’ or ‘print double-sided.’ Instead, we’re here to focus on the bigger drains on your time and resources.

It’s common in the workplace to click ‘print’ only to forget about retrieving your document. This results in your print job being tossed in the trash (or hopefully recycling) by a coworker who’s annoyed with the stockpile of forgotten documents bogging down the community printer.

Whether it’s a coffee refill, lunch break, or an impromptu conversation with coworkers, distractions aren’t avoidable. But, implementing Secure Release Printing processes to reduce waste is very doable.

Secure Release Printing allows a printer to withhold a print job until an employee is ready to retrieve it. When ready, an employee will release their desired print job in person by swiping their badge, entering a user ID/PIN, or using a smartphone app, regardless of when they clicked ‘print.’

This feature can save organizations thousands of dollars per employee every year in paper, ink, toner, storage, copying, postage, disposal, and recycling costs.

Don’t worry, security guards on Segways aren’t necessary. We’re talking about the behind-the-scenes protection for your print environment. A prominent vulnerability across all fields and organizations is not properly securing your print infrastructure.

Printer servers are often overlooked as simple internal devices, which is why they’re an easy vantage point for cyber attackers. Because the print server is connected to all devices, it serves as a single point of failure. That makes it a high-value target, and vulnerabilities are being found more often than ever in print server and server spooling software. If hackers can get through to your print server, they potentially gain access to your network, confidential files, and your organization’s data overall.

Forbes reports the average cost of a data breach from 2020 was $3.86 million. In addition, BigCommerce reported the average cost of a data breach in 2020 for big business was more than $150 million. Whether your company is big or small, the price to pay for a vulnerable print network is costly.

The purpose of the IT department is to ensure all technologies are running smoothly and to personally assist employees in properly using their devices. This often means fielding numerous helpdesk tickets for printing requests and repeatedly having to deal with driver upgrades and day-to-day management.

Without a streamlined print process, IT departments are bogged down fixing outdated problems like individually installing a printer on each employee’s computer, manually implementing updates, and addressing all employees’ printer connectivity issues in person. Today, these problems can all be solved using self-service printing portals and automatic deployments.

These features increase efficiency across the board by allowing automatic updates to be pushed network-wide and end users to download new printers themselves. That means IT employees spend their time working on more prominent, cost-effective work. Providing a centrally managed print process increases productivity for everyone in the organization and can mean significant cost savings to spend on other business ventures.

It’s time to take stock of your print environment and stop wasting money on old systems. Find out how a serverless print infrastructure can help you reduce printing costs today.