A Few Reasons for Enabling Secure Printing

Lurking in the shadows of your office is a disgruntled employee, he or she has already interviewed for other sales jobs and last week accepted a sales job at a competitor. But this sneaky son of bitch negotiated that he or she can't start for another 30 days. 

Why is that?

Or how about this one, you printed out an account list to work or some additional support documents for accounts you went to the printer and the prints were not there. Where did they go, did they ever print?

Most likely someone has stolen that printed data, account list or intellectual property. In the above case it was the person who is making plans to leave the company and in the mean time is gathering information on as many accounts as possible from as many reps or managers as possible.

Let's not stop there, this employee may also be picking up invoices or information that has personal or business credit card information. 

Everyone has put up such a fuss over the securing their hard drives, wiping data from the hard drives or even replacing the hard drives on leased copiers and they ignore the easiest loss of data, accounts, and intellectual property which is left on paper at the copiers and printers in their office!

With recent trends in the office to eliminate desktop printers and mandates to use workgroup printers that have a lower cost many companies are open to identity theft and account theft.  The question is are you having that discussion with your existing accounts and prospects?  If not I'd bet dollars to doughnuts your competition is.

Just in the past month, I've had more requests for secure printing that I've had in the last six months.  All of our MFP manufacturers offer some time of secure print feature with their print drivers and their systems, but what happens when your prospect or customer wants to secure print their existing fleet of printers. With Ricoh systems I can handle the MFP's with Ricoh print drivers that have a secure print offering, but securing the fleet of printers or copiers from a host of different manufacturers is a horse of a different color.

One Print Management Solution that I like is Print Secure from Print Audit.  Print Secure captures and hold print jobs via client software that is deployed to individual work stations, and a server component must be installed to a single computer on the network.

Users can also release their print jobs at the printer (prox card reader) or manage their jobs by logging into the secure web portal through any device with web access.  Thus you could release your job via your smart phone, a web browser on the MFP/printer, pc workstation or a tablet.  The Secure Web portal also allows users to view detailed information about each print job in the queue such as document name, user, time printed and the printer that was used and more.

Print Audit also has some neat programs for dealers to help them win business with their Premier Program.  Dealers can take advantage of a monthly billing that will include "x" amount of licenses for all of their products.  In the case of one client that I'm working I would be able to bill month or quarterly for "x" amount of Print Secure license to the end user.  The main benefit is the customer will not have to layout the entire cost of the licenses, they can enable a payment plan where they can add licenses as they need them. This is awesome for companies that are growing at a rapid rate.

It only takes a few seconds to have the print secure talk with your prospect or customer, and who knows you may uncover some pain in their printing process or it may lead to other print management solutions.  There's an old saying "if you don't ask you don't get", make you ask!.

-=Good Selling=-