Secure Print: An Underutilized Function You Need to Know About

How many printers are in your office? For most companies, that is actually a question they have trouble answering, especially when there are a lot of staff members in the office. We have seen offices with 200 employees have up to 100 printers, many of them sitting at the desks of key staff.

When we asked why there were so many printers, one of the most common answers was that the staff member printed items that were sensitive, and they did not want the print job sitting on the printer for others to see. This could be items like staff salaries, printouts of emails, or contracts that had very sensitive information contained in these print jobs.

In this article, we are going to discuss secure print and how it can help you with your company’s printer fleet and your workers’ print security.

 

What is Secure Print?

Secure print is a feature in many manufacturers’ print drivers where you can send a job that is released only when you authenticate with a badge reader, QR code, or PIN code you enter. Every organization has documents that are secure and should not be printed by just anyone. In order to be released to the printer for printing, the job has to be validated. This way, the job isn’t sitting at the printer if you get called or distracted. It will be in the print queue and released only when you authenticate as the document’s owner.

 

How Does it Help?

The cool thing to know about secure print is that if your team uses it, this means that not every person who prints secure documents needs their own printer. You can push more prints and copiers to bigger devices at a lower per print cost. Also, the jobs will have higher print quality if they are printed on a bigger and better copier.

Using the more durable device will reduce your organization’s cost of printing as well as minimize the IT burden caused by printer repair tickets. The devices that print will be the ones that were designed to take on the stress of larger workloads. It will also help you not have to store as many toner cartridges and drums in your supply closet.

Another benefit of Secure Print is that it will actually reduce the amount printed. In some cases, your staff will send the job to the printer and then realize the document isn’t quite right. In this case, they will be able to purge the document, which saves the cost of printing the document that wasn’t right in the first place.

Secure Print is a way you can give your staff the ability to print privately, but not need their own printers. This feature can even be set as the default for those whose printing is nearly all confidential.

 

We Can Help!

Secure Print is a feature most businesses can utilize, and if you would like to get your office using Secure Print, we can help. We have a team experienced in device setup and training who will work with your team to show them how your organization can use Secure Print for your team!