The past 20 years saw the advent of cloud storage solutions – Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive – completely transforming the way organizations run their IT infrastructure.
If you look at the software stack of a modern business, almost every core tool moved to the cloud a decade ago. We use SaaS for email, file storage, and HR management without a second thought. Yet, in many offices, the humble print server remains the final piece of physical hardware sitting in the closet.
This delay isn’t because IT managers are stuck in their ways – it’s because printing is notoriously difficult to get right in a cloud environment. It’s one of the few office functions that requires a digital command to result in a physical output, and that bridge has been a challenge to build.
Moving print management to the cloud involves more than just hosting a server in a remote data center. It requires a fundamental rethink of how data moves across the internet and how devices communicate without a direct local connection.
For a long time, the technology wasn’t ready to handle the security and reliability needs of a professional fleet. Here’s a look at the core concepts that explain why printing was a late bloomer, and how we finally solved the puzzle.
The age of cloud
Recent years have seen an acceleration in organizations moving to the cloud, driven by the appeal of remote access for employees and enhanced security compared with on-premises file storage.
Over time, cloud storage solutions became more advanced – what started as a convenient way to share files with people outside the organization eventually replaced traditional file servers. Little by little, SaaS vendors began adding extra features that had long been a pipe dream, such as working on documents directly within web browsers, reducing the need for packaging, testing and deploying apps.
The shift to the cloud has led to the rise of SaaS providers, who design and manage specialized solutions to cater to other business needs. As organizations adopt more of these subscription-based cloud services, fewer core systems run on their own servers.
This allowed organizations to downsize their internal IT generalist teams, reallocating IT expenditure to specialist IT roles focused on solving organization-specific problems.
Understanding the barriers for print
According to my colleague and PaperCut Principal Product Manager, Keith O’Brien, the biggest inhibitor of cloud printing is the availability of the technology to provide a consistent user experience when compared with a traditional print server.
His view is that the print server has been around for decades: it’s well-understood, mature, reliable, and robust. When you move into the cloud, you must reinvent a solution that will do the same job as a print server, which takes a lot of time and money, not to mention expertise and innovation to create a replacement for the traditional print server.
That means print management companies need to not only develop expertise in the cloud, but they also must drop down into the server and build that level of infrastructure.
Print infrastructure integrates with other core systems. This means sharing user identity information. Traditionally, a firewall protected this data. In the cloud, that layer isn’t there. Print management must be extremely secure for data at rest. It’s a high priority for any modern IT leader.
Large printer drivers can create massive files. Some jobs exceed 1GB. Moving to the cloud often means sending jobs over the internet. This isn’t efficient for bandwidth. A good solution should keep print jobs on the local network.
Our Edge Mesh technology solves these bandwidth issues. It keeps print data local while managing everything in the cloud. This eliminates the risk of sending jobs outside your network. It’s the best of both worlds for speed and security. PaperCut Hive makes this seamless.
Myths and an ideal world
We often hear myths surrounding cloud-based print management, such as the assertion that public cloud solutions are not secure because the IT team doesn’t have the same level of control as with private cloud.
In an ideal world, where the IT team are experts in printing (rare), experts in securing their systems and data flows using VPNs or other techniques, and bandwidth is unlimited, this may be true. In reality, most organizations don’t have this level of expertise in-house, and they instead rely on their print service provider’s expertise to build a secure public cloud print system.
PaperCut’s solution is built from the ground up to run on the Cloud Platform from Google, who have the scale and expertise to ensure their server infrastructure is secure and resilient from attacks, while PaperCut ensures data in transit is secure.
What’s driving demand for cloud printing?
Firstly, there are clear financial benefits to the cloud. On-premise servers require upfront capital investment, which includes their servers, network and monitoring equipment, air conditioning and so on. This impacts cash flow through depreciation, whereas SaaS isn’t a capital expense. It can be offset in the first year to help liquidity, and offer business growth.
As businesses scale down on their file servers and other essential activities, they’re able to reduce their IT teams and remove a skillset that is quite expensive to develop – instead outsourcing management to the vendor. As a result, IT personnel can become very specialized in high-value areas, rather than requiring generalist knowledge.
Exposure to cyberattacks is another major factor, with small businesses to enterprises often all needing security professionals. Directors face fines if data isn’t safe. Outsourcing to specialists mitigates this risk. PaperCut MF leverages advanced safeguards and controls, and is a vital part of a modern security posture.
It’s worth noting that the level of protection in cloud printing always comes back to the vendor. Here at PaperCut, we know we can build a better customer experience and product by leveraging the framework Google provides us, with the benefit of all those safeguards and controls. That’s why we can put our name behind what we do and say with confidence that it’s secure.
Read more about the modernization of print
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