When the pandemic hit in 2020, remote work went mainstream overnight as employees suddenly needed to do their jobs entirely from home. Five years on, it’s now about working from anywhere: moving fluidly between home offices, coworking spaces, cafes, libraries, and company headquarters.
And yet many IT environments are still built around the outdated assumption that everyone is tied to a single, fixed location. What’s needed is location-aware IT that follows your people – not the other way around. That includes your print setup.
According to Gallup, 52% of remote-capable employees in the US now work in hybrid arrangements, while another 26% are fully remote. That’s a whopping 8 out of 10 employees who are no longer going into an office every day.
To keep up with the demands of a hybrid workforce, organizations have to make sure their IT infrastructure reflects this flexibility – with secure, seamless, and location-aware printing.
The challenges of decentralized IT
One of the key challenges of a hybrid workforce is that it effectively decentralizes the IT environment. Working from anywhere, employees may be logged into home networks, office Wi-Fi, or even public hotspots, using a mix of company-issued laptops and their own personal devices.
All this flexibility is empowering for workers, but creates a number of headaches for IT administrators. The biggest one is that traditional print servers really don’t cut it anymore, since they depend on users being inside the company network. The only alternative is to connect everyone via a VPN, but this carries ongoing licensing costs – not to mention the hassle of using it.
Remote work can also create a lot of confusion and guesswork around which printers can be used and which can’t, depending on where the person is. For example, consider a car dealership with multiple branches that each have a service and sales department. Employees need to be able to print from the correct printer, regardless of what site they’re on. But when people are moving around all time, the number of different print queues adds an enormous amount of technical complexity. A similar situation might apply to many industries, from school campuses to real estate offices.
Finally, hybrid working widens the security gaps. Without proper controls, users may be emailing files to their personal accounts, and sending print jobs across unsecured networks or to the wrong printer – all of which increase the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information. This is a real and growing concern: one report shows that 45% of organizations have experienced a security incident directly linked to remote work.
A smarter, more secure approach to printing is one where the system adapts to the user. Enter location-aware print management.
The solution: location-aware printing
Today, flexible printing isn’t just a “nice-to-have” – it’s a necessity. Employees don’t want to worry about which network they’re connected to or setting up a specific print server. They just want to hit print and know that it will work.
Context- or location-aware print management helps bridge the gap, by automatically connecting users to the right printers, wherever they are. It’s a small but critical shift that makes hybrid work seamless, secure, and frustration-free. The key to location-aware printing is Print Deploy, a print queue deployment tool that gets the right printer drivers and print queues to the right person in the right location – dynamically downloading printers onto the user device as they move from one place to another.
Great in theory, but what does this actually look like? It’s hitting print when you’re working late from home, and then walking into the office the next morning and collecting the document straight from the printer. Context-aware printing considers who you are, your role, your device, and your location, then applies the right access rules or “zones”. In the car dealership example, when a technician visits another branch, the system updates automatically, without requiring any manual print queue setup.
Behind the scenes, there are a couple of important functionalities that make true location-awareness possible. The first is Find-Me printing, which is the ability for users to send their print jobs to a single queue from their device, and release their jobs from whichever printer they’re closest to, at any time. It provides a seamless experience for users, who see one familiar printer name even if it maps to a different physical printer depending on their location.
Find-Me Printing ties in with another key feature: Secure Print Release. This means that print jobs are held in the cloud until the user is physically present at the printer. To release the document, the owner of the print job must confirm their identity – typically via a swipe card or PIN – preventing documents from being left unattended and falling into the wrong hands.
And for an added security boost, modern print management solutions encrypt the print job while it’s travelling across the network, ensuring that confidential data remains protected both in transit and at rest.
Flexible printing and the future of hybrid work
Hybrid work isn’t going away any time soon – and neither is printing. With Print Deploy, organizations are already able to simplify the time consuming, frustrating tasks of setting up print queues and deploying printer drivers in managed environments. Through Find-Me Printing and Secure Print Release, they can also offer users a frictionless printing experience with robust security measures in place. In short, convenience doesn’t have to come at the expense of control.
So what’s next for flexible printing? As the modern print stack platform simplifies and technologies like Windows Protected Print mature, I can see driver management fading into the background; fewer print drivers translates to significantly lower IT overhead and security risk.
From a user point of view, all people want is easy printing – no setup, no confusion. It’s about never having to think about print again. Your print environment needs to offer as much flexibility as hybrid work itself: secure, context-aware, and built around users who move between locations and devices.
So in a future where remote working is the norm, there is no longer a question around whether to modernize your print setup. It’s how soon you can make the switch.
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