74% of printing devices sold in the UK&I are not managed under a contract*, if your organisation is struggling to manage the unmanaged, and looking for a way to improve productivity and reduce costs, now’s a great time to take print to the cloud
Vasion, a leader in serverless printing infrastructure, surveyed 520 public sector organisations in the UK to find out more about how print is managed across various departments and multiple locations. Just under half (45%) of respondents said that their entire print infrastructure was provided under a managed print services (MPS) agreement. However, the majority of organisations owned a varying number of print devices that fell outside of the MPS contract – in fact 39% of those polled said that up to 75% of the printers in their organisation were standalone unmanaged devices.
Self-managed printing environments are full of pain points for IT teams and end-users alike. On-premise print servers are energy- and cost-intensive to run and maintain. Providing end- users with access to printers often involves complicated scripting and GPOs; it’s well documented that high numbers of print-related IT support tickets place added pressure onto over-stretched IT resources; and in many cases, print failure is not a quick or simple fix, resulting in disgruntled end-users.
One of the most surprising findings of the Vasion research was that print was not perceived to be a problem among senior managers and the C-Suite. 32% of this contingent said that print-related issues were resolved in less than five minutes; compared to 62% of end-users who stipulated that it takes IT more than an hour to find a fix. Moreover, almost half (49%) of end-user respondents stated that they raised a helpdesk support request for print more than once a month.
Managing the unmanaged
It’s fair to say that while MPS has long been the de facto to effectively manage on-premise print infrastructures, in today’s remote and hybrid working model, it doesn’t always make sense for every printing device – but what’s the best alternative?
Enter the cloud – what PrinterLogic’s cloud-native serverless print management solution does is enable seamless driver deployment for large volumes of printing devices that exist outside of the MPS contract. For example, PrinterLogic manages 11,500 print queues across 2,500 retail stores worldwide for a large retail customer whose 80-strong head office printer fleet falls under a managed print service.
The future of print management
With its cloud-native print management product PrinterLogic – which won the Cloud print Management Solution of the Year award at the 2022 PrintIT Awards (see opposite), Vasion has been helping customers to transform how they manage print.
- Lessen the IT burden. Gartner estimates that print-related helpdesk tickets account for 40% of an IT team’s workload, with PrinterLogic, customers typically see a 95% reduction in print- related helpdesk calls.
- Eliminate print servers. One of the biggest issues cited by customers is the cost of running print servers, an issue even more pertinent now in light of the energy crisis. In addition to licensing fees, the labour cost of managing print servers can be extremely expensive too, because they must be maintained at every location. PrinterLogic enables organisations to remove the burden of managing, maintaining and licensing on- premise print servers, and enjoy all of the benefits of a serverless printing infrastructure.
- Minimise risk. An organisation’s attack surface gets larger with every print server added to the network. Constantly having to manually patch, update and secure multiple servers to protect from and mitigate vulnerabilities like the Windows Print Nightmare, adds even more to the IT workload. By moving to serverless printing, organisations can reduce risk and be protected from any future issues that are discovered. In addition, PrinterLogic is the only print management software to achieve AWS Digital Workplace Competency status.
- SaaS printing solution. The PrinterLogic cloud-native platform is a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) printing solution – that doesn’t require VPN connections. Integrations with leading identity providers (IdPs) keeps things secure and enables printing from remote or new locations.
- Protect data. Features such as secure release printing keeps information secure by ensuring that documents are not printed until the person is there to pick them up. Plus, direct-IP printing means print jobs never leave the customer’s network.
- Central management. PrinterLogic provides IT staff with an interface for defining all printers including label and POS devices across all locations. It supports native print drivers for all printer makes and models which delivers full functionality of the devices’ feature set, profile settings and deployment options. Settings are configured in profiles and instantly passed down to the endpoint when they are installed.
- Self-service portal. A web- based tool with floorplan maps enables end-users to easily identify and install nearby printers. Based on the deployment profiles from IT, only authorised printers will be displayed to users when they look at the map, even if other printers are in the vicinity.
- Desktop client. Installed on end-users’ desktops, the desktop client acts as the communication liaison between the workstation or virtual client and the admin console. It automatically installs select printers on the user’s device and captures usage data that includes user, IP address and operating system.
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Reduce print costs. Over and above the cost savings around infrastructure, with PrinterLogic’s serverless solution, it’s also possible to further improve the bottom line with features such as the ability to set print quotas to make budgeting easier or applying rules such as forced duplex or black-and-white-only printing across the business to cut down on additional expenses.
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Case in point
PrinterLogic lessens IT workloads by empowering end-users to install their
own printers and can reduce overall print management by a staggering 93%Don’t just take our word for it, here’s what some of our customers said.
“The number of support tickets dropped by 60% year-on-year after UW Health deployed PrinterLogic, and they saw a 20% drop in average problem- resolution time.”
“We have almost zero print- related helpdesk tickets. We went from about 2,500 printer- related tickets in a year down to three or four.” Chris Nilsson, Director of Technology Integration at CISD
“In the end, PrinterLogic eliminated the risk of print servers being a single point of failure and also helped reduce overall management costs for Wipfli.” Michael Voegtline, Senior Engineering Analyst at Wipfli LLP
If you want to empower end- users with mobile printing, secure release printing, and many advanced features, we’d love to show you how.
You can book a demo by visiting https://printerlogic.com/ schedule-a-demo/
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