The Datamax Thinking Blog

How can you guarantee a Return on Investment without overarching control and full visibility of your print environment and end-user activities?

Leaders are routinely tasked with taking the “10,000 foot-view” perspective.

After all, it’s from this vantage point far above that reveals the entire landscape. Without a global view, it’s hard to make decisions and strategic moves that benefit the entire organization. It’s not uncommon in most technology engagements to host strategic, pre-rollout assessments and then actively monitor and control the relevant landscape.

Superintendents, campus IT, and administrative teams must work together to maximize budgets while managing printing proactively to deliver a secure, accessible print environment for everyone on campus. This is where a Print Management solution becomes a valuable asset.

Mark Twain has this funny quote about a teacher’s first day back in the classroom.

“Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, ‘It was like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at the same time.’” IT administrators on campus might often feel the same.

What happens when Zero Trust encounters your print environment?  How do you avoid compromising an otherwise locked-down IT environment? How do you retain the ability to print as needed? 

For a rising number of organizations today, when it comes to security, trust simply cannot be earned without proper approval. No exceptions. Seventy-two percent of organizations are either in the process of adopting Zero Trust Security or have already adopted it, according to Statista.

Let's face it. Applying the right security settings and ensuring best practices can get complicated fast, but Canon’s Unified Firmware Platform (UFP) simplifies that for you.

Firewalls, VPNs, anti-virus protection... these are all commonplace in today's tumultuous cyber security landscape. It goes without saying that cybersecurity is a top initiative for organizations aiming to protect sensitive information and their reputation.  What about your copiers and printers, and their inherent need for protection? Perhaps less commonplace. 

How capable are you in controlling both users and devices, i.e. how well do you curb wasteful printing habits?

Printability is a common term in the realm of business. It’s simply the capability of a document to be printed to whatever desired format, style, or quality.

Print Ability? That calls for a deeper discussion. Print Ability is a term we’ve coined here to ask, simply, how smart and capable are you with handling your organization’s print behavior? Call it Print Management 101.

A print security vulnerability could be something as ubiquitous as a user hitting "Print," forgetting, and the job (with sensitive information) ending up in the wrong hands, or as malicious as an intentional data breach. 

All great stories eventually come to end.

Whether that ending is unexpected, shocking, or largely ambiguous, it provides some level of resolution. It’s in our DNA as readers and as humans to expect a beginning, middle, and end to any story. Without this simple, basic narrative structure in place, we’re left feeling anxious, restless, frustrated even.

Outside of restricting who can see and use which printers, basic usage tracking capabilities, and other vanilla print management features, Microsoft Universal Print does not do much else— especially compared to the full-blown print management solutions that we’ve evaluated in the past." - Keypoint Intelligence

For organizations eager to extend their existing cloud services, the arrival of Universal Print was a much anticipated and more-than-welcome technology delivery.

Exploring ways to print, scan, and share documents efficiently, securely, and to regain accurate visibility of print costs? It helps you put more time into forward-thinking initiatives that ultimately benefit your classrooms.

It’s one of the most memorable slogans in education — “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

• But what about wasted paper?
• What about wasted costs related to excessive printing?
• What about wasted time on print-related maintenance?
• What about wasted opportunities to shore up your print security? 

The short answer is that cloud services create new opportunities. Print management is no exception.

Just as migration is a necessary journey toward available resources at any given time, businesses, too, are increasingly finding new capabilities in the cloud.

Cloud migration is soaring. Flexera’s “2020 State of the Cloud Report” says that 93% of enterprises use some form of multi-cloud services, up from 84% in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing Work From Home mandates only rushed the migration for many.

uniFLOW Online is designed to help reduce overall printing costs, maintain print and workflow productivity, and keep printed documents out of the wrong hands.

As the last 12 months has evidenced, work environments are ever-changing.