Data privacy can often be a huge problem. When people think of security breaches in their systems, they mostly think about hackers. Businesses, schools, law firms, health care clinics, and hospitals, among many others spend time and money making sure they have super security within their systems building firewalls or spending on intrusion detection systems.
While checking these things and spending time on them is important, this necessity to try and keep others out, makes you forget about the ones who are already in. By this I mean, those who work in these buildings and print. Luckily, PaperCut MF has great security features that can help you prevent data breaches and leaks when it comes to printing.
Data Breaches Through Printing?
Yes. An occurrence that is often heavily overlooked, data breaches through printing are often just accidents. These accidents though can lead to people’s personal information being leaked, government information being leaked, and it can even cost a person their job. You may ask yourself, how do accidents like these happen?
Apart from the 7 horror stories of government officials and politicians leaving important documents on public transportation (linked in the paragraph above), it is easy for employees to just pick up documents from printers that aren’t even theirs. As we’ve seen, it is also just as easy for someone to anonymously leave a document behind somewhere on accident. Here are 3 ways PaperCut MF secures printing to prevent data breaches and a quick note about GDPR.
Secure Print Release
Watermarking
Another solution PaperCut MF offers to prevent those data breaches are watermarks and digital signatures. PaperCut MF applies a visible light gray text on the bottom of each page. This allows people who may pick up the document by mistake to see the name of who printed it.
Likewise, if left somewhere, it is detailed with who printed at what time and what day. Another option is to have the watermark as an overlay on the page. A digital signature is often what follows the watermark. Oftentimes it Is a code or number that further allows you to tie the document back to whomever originally printed it.
Not only does cloud-based printing reduce your infrastructure but it offers maintenance advantages. We all know this one. We already use various subscription-based cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, AWS, and so on. The hardware maintenance is handled for you.
There’s no doubt that self-hosting is generally cheaper when you have the expertise on-site. But what if there’s a cost to acquire that expertise? Different businesses with different levels of expertise will benefit from different approaches.
Cloud-based print management is also rapidly deployed so it lessens the burden of implementation and administration. It also has a benefit of auto-scaling, depending on your requirements or usage. In a self-hosted world, you often need to commit to a server that speaks to your requirements. If you grow you need to buy a new one. In the cloud it auto-scales, so it’s a flexible system.
So the two steps forward here is all that flexibility and elasticity. The step back? In your on-prem/self-hosted world, you’re buying the server, there’s no bandwidth or ongoing costs, it’s very predictable. So the trade-off here is it’s out of your control. That can be a benefit, or a drawback, depending on your print environment.
Print Archiving
While some may see print archiving as a type of breach of security, it allows system administrators to monitor content as well as the number of pages being printed. Sysadmins can also view and sort through archived content as a job log for any given printer, account, or user.
Along with this, print archiving helps with assisting with business decisions, usage management, enterprise-level document retrieval, and information security and audit policies. If you would like to learn more about what print archiving can do and how it will help, click here.
GDPR
A quick note and lesson on GDPR. First, what does GDPR stand for and what exactly is it? General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR is new rules for data handling that was created in the EU. This new set of data handling rules affects companies that have personal identity data about their customers.
While your company may not be based in Europe, if you have clients/customers in Europe who are not complying with GDPR rules, your company could still get into trouble and be fined even if you’re based in the US or Latin America. Check out this blog article to learn more information about GDPR.
When it comes to document, print, and data security, PaperCut MF’s CEO Chris Dance breaks it down like this, “We often think of print security as the security before print, the security of the printing process itself, and more importantly, this is what’s often underbaked, security after printing.” As an authorized solution center, ecoprintQ is here to assist you with all things PaperCut.
ecoprintQ creates solutions and brings you the support you need for any of your sales or technical related needs. For more information about PaperCut MF and what ecoprintQ can do to help you, call us at 800-236-8499 or send us an email at sales@ecoprintq.com.
