We’ve written before about why businesses are moving their printing to cloud services . Today, we’ll tackle the trickier question of when will businesses switch from printing on-premise with print servers to SaaS cloud print management solutions.
According to Future Market Insights, the cloud printing services market is valued around $1.5 billion right now, and it’s expected to hit $4.6 billion over the coming years.
This isn’t too surprising in a post-COVID world. Since the pandemic, there’s been an acceleration of businesses transitioning to the cloud. 89% of businesses are now using multi-cloud solutions, and about a third of organizations now run 75% of their workload through the cloud.
To answer the question, “When will businesses switch their printing from on-premise to cloud?” Well, they already are. So, when exactly should you make the jump, if you haven’t already? That’s going to differ for every organization. Here are a few factors to consider…
4 considerations when switching to cloud print management
1. There’s no need to rush
If you’re saying, “Look, all the cool kids are transitioning to cloud print services! But I just recently re-signed my on-prem contract for my print management needs”, don’t worry. There’s absolutely no rush. Cloud print management will still be there tomorrow – probably in a cheaper, more optimized form.
If you’re still managing with an on-premise print management set-up, you don’t need to speed over to the cloud. If your workplace already has an infrastructure in place for your printing, you don’t need to go full Office Space on your print server to keep up with the trend of moving to the cloud.
Case Study: DNEAT
The only time you need to go cloud-based is if your print environment is essentially lawless. This was the case with one of our clients , The Diocese of Norwich Education and Academies Trust (DNEAT), a multi-site education facility in Suffolk, England. DNEAT had 10,000 students and no IT team, so you can imagine what their print environment looked like…absolute chaos. They needed a cloud-native print solution, which is where PaperCut came into the picture.
Now, not all organizations are as complex, or chaotic, as DNEAT was. Which brings us to our next point…
2. If your print environment is simple, you can move now
There’s no need to be hasty for intricate print environments. But for simple workplace environments with a limited number of users and devices, you can (and probably should) move your print management to the cloud as soon as possible.
Especially if you’re the type of workplace already using cloud services like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, etc. If you’re already in the cloud for most of your operations, it makes more sense to get your print management in the cloud than keeping or purchasing a print server. There’s a lot to unpack here, so it’s worth diving into the benefits of cloud printing in more detail. The short version? Cloud print management is usually more efficient, more flexible, and cheaper to run than on-site print servers.
Case Study: Cambridge University
Let’s look at another example: Cambridge University . For a long time, they were running Google Cloud Print, until that product got axed. Now they use PaperCut Mobility Print to enable BYOD printing for over 20,000 students. What’s interesting about Cambridge is that not all of the university uses cloud print services, so we’re able to compare performance.
“We have parts of the University that don’t have PaperCut,” says Kelvin Morgan, Cambridge’s computer officer. “These parts are predominantly within the University itself, not the Colleges. They tend not to use print management, and so lose out. Purchasing of print hardware is done on an ad-hoc basis without firstly thinking about their overall need within the department.
“If we look at the unmanaged parts of the University the service offering doesn’t compare to that of what we currently offer within the managed print service,” says Kelvin. “With more centralized purchasing of devices, we can specify the models that we know work with our service. We can then also put in maintenance contracts and agreements for consumables which have us saving money week on week.”
3. Choose public cloud-native solutions, not public cloud-added
If we have a golden rule at PaperCut, this is it. If you’re going to use a public cloud , you need a cloud-native solution that was designed to go public. Something like PaperCut Hive .
This is all about the difference between public cloud and private cloud, which we’ve written a handy guide on in our cloud basics blog series . It gets complicated, but the main difference is that the public cloud uses shared resources over the internet, whereas the private cloud is purpose-built cloud functionality hosted in a data center.
The biggest contrast between private and public cloud is security: you control your private cloud data; public cloud is outsourced to a provider.
When most people consider moving to the cloud, they’ll be looking at a public cloud solution (i.e. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365). Therefore, if you’re going public cloud, go public cloud native. Don’t get public cloud-added, which is a private cloud solution that’s been hurriedly adapted to create a public cloud effect. That’s just going to mask a lot of expense and complexity.
We specifically chose not to adapt our flagship solution PaperCut MF to the public cloud. It would be a stretch to claim world-class security if we just migrated our existing codebase from private to public. We made the conscientious decision to perform a line-one code rewrite specifically for public cloud when creating our cloud-native print management solution, PaperCut Hive .
Cloud-native is the most secure public cloud offering, it means it’s been designed following shift-left security principles. Using our own cloud-native solution PaperCut Hive as an example, before one line of code was written security was baked into the design, not just left until penetration testing (which is also a vital part of designing secure solutions).
This brings us to our last point…
4. Hybrid work is here to stay
When you should migrate your print services to the cloud is dependent on your workforce. Is everyone back in the office full-time? If so, you probably don’t need to rush out and buy cloud-native print management software. An on-site server will do fine. But if half your staff are working remotely, which seems to be the case for many companies these days, it makes more sense to upgrade to a public cloud-native solution.
Many workplaces have been meaning to move from on-prem data centers to the likes of Azure and Google Cloud. However, the bigger the infrastructure, the more monumental the task of moving to the cloud. We get that.
On the other hand, for many workplaces, employees needed to work from home and access their data remotely. And it’s the same for some printing environments. Cloud printing gives you that flexibility and BYOD-compatibility. Anyone can print from anywhere using anything – their tablet, their phone, their laptop, what-have-you.
Whether you’re working from home at all times or are fortunate to work in a hybrid home/office split, your printing needs to be as flexible as accessing your documents over the cloud. That makes now the perfect time to move to cloud-native print management if your business is well-positioned to do so.
Feeling like it’s the right time to move to cloud print? We can help ease the transition. Just give our friendly team a call and they’ll be able to recommend a PaperCut product to suit your needs, and your organization.
