Print Management – 3 Steps To Prevent Print Security Breaches
How To Achieve A Secure Print Infrastructure
Quocirca 2013 Research reported that 63% of organizations have experienced one or more data breaches through printing.
And yet, many organizations are not doing enough to protect their printing environment, leaving themselves open to potential data breaches.
Dealing with printing security can be labor intensive and time consuming, but is still the responsibility of the organization to ensure document security.
Print Security Breaches
In any organization, there are typically two types of print security breach scenarios.
The first being unintentional breaches, in which an authorized user prints a confidential document to a shared printer, and another user collects it by accident.
Another example could be a user sending a confidential document to the wrong printer due to the vast amount of printing devices available on the network and losing track of it in the process.
The second type of print security breaches are intentional ones, confidential documents and print errors may be compromised by disgruntled employees, causing some serious damage to the organization.
Secure Print Management
In order to achieve a secure print infrastructure, IT departments can follow these three sequential steps to set up a secure printing framework:
Decide: Figure out what level of print security you realistically need to achieve and how it can best be achieved.
Prioritize departments where confidential documents come out and are vulnerable to breaches.
Also identify which areas are often misused for personal print. Set out to educate these users and ensure they understand the financial impact of breaches in a company.
Document: Documenting results remains the key to cost savings and regulatory proof points.
Don’t forget that it is IT department’s responsibility to demonstrate ongoing security and monitoring compliance when it comes to securing confidential documents.
Without documented data and evidence, you have no tool for correction. This means using an archiving tool that allows print data to be archived in a database, allowing you concrete, traceable reference points of who is printing what, where and when.
By documenting your findings, it allows for deeper analysis and recommendations for the next appropriate course of action.
Deliver: Never leave anything to chance. Educating your end users on printing security is essential, but ultimately it is not their responsibility to provide secure printing.
In deployment, look for secure printing solutions that help take the burden of delivery away from you, cover all IT platforms, integrate with all printers on your existing infrastructure, and offer sustainable cost reductions.
In this new era of cloud and mobility, enterprises need to be more proactive in securing their print infrastructure as they are with the rest of the IT infrastructure.
In the long run, it is worth implementing and achieving a sustainable and demonstrable secure print infrastructure.
By using an appropriate level of printing security for their business needs, enterprises can ensure that their most value assets are protected.
