If there’s one takeaway from the recent pandemic, it is that fortune favours those who embrace digital transformation to recalibrate and adapt rapidly to change.
IT leaders are taking notes amid recession fears this year. Foundry’s recent Digital Business Study 2023 found that 93% of IT leaders in the region surveyed have either started to adopt or have already adopted a digital-first approach for their business, driven primarily by employee productivity, cost savings, and business resilience goals.
With digital transformation top of mind for IT leaders, it’s only natural that cloud adoption continues to grow even in the most unlikely area: print management. Consider how 31% of respondents in Quocirca’s Cloud Print Services 2023 Study now manage printing fully or mostly in the cloud, and more than half (55%) expect to do so by 2025.
The case for cloud print management platforms: cost, performance, and security
The shift to a cloud print strategy is well underway, although not at the same pace as cloud adoption itself. Often at times, the enormous scope of digital transformation—and its ripple effect across the organisation—overwhelms IT leaders. They then opt to adopt the cloud in bite-sized approaches, especially in non-core business functions such as communications, finance, and human resources.
But the erosion of the traditional workplace, coupled with the rise of devices and democratisation of digital, adds pressure on IT leaders to step on the gas on digital transformation in a bid to stay competitive. How do IT leaders reshape costs, performance, and security concerns into tangible benefits? This is possible with the right platform that can meet the challenges of an evolving enterprise environment.
Here are three questions to ask yourself when assessing cloud print management platforms:
Does it give IT teams visibility into the print environment?
Transparency is synonymous with simplicity. This starts by centralising operations from a single platform for complete visibility—and therefore control—over the organisation’s printing, copying, faxing, and scanning behaviour regardless of the location of every device. It’s also with visibility that data can be harnessed to gain insights into print behaviours, pinpointing areas to minimise waste and save costs on consumables and maintenance.
Apart from the obvious cost efficiencies related to the use, maintenance, and upgrades of printer servers since local servers are no longer required, unifying print management frees up precious IT time so they can focus on more strategic and value-creating initiatives.
Does it deliver a seamless end-user experience?
Happy workers are productive workers. In a world where user experience is king, you’d do well to equip them with the right tools to get the job done. This might come in the form of sending documents to a print device quickly and securely via a smartphone or tablet, printing jobs to their personal queue with a simple email to a central address, or even delegating print jobs to colleagues for release and collection from print queues.
Given the diversity of apps today, it’s a big plus to have a cloud print management strategy that supports a host of document and image file types. After all, a seamless end-user experience adds up to optimised workflows and collaboration, and ultimately, outcomes.
Is it designed with data security and sovereignty in mind?
In a previous article, we dove into the importance of a zero-trust environment. This means having multi-factor and flexible authentication, identity access management, device security, and remote monitoring and reporting tools that can track user behaviour and device anomalies such as DDoS attacks.
There’s also the risk of being exposed to international laws and governance structures different to those of Australia and New Zealand. One way to ensure your cloud print management platform can achieve compliance is by storing regional customer data within the area it is collected.
Taking print networks to the cloud with uniFLOW
Print management might not be top of mind when thinking about cloud adoption, but it shouldn’t be ignored for its cost, performance, and security gains.
Canon bridges the gap between paper and digital processes with uniFLOW Online, a secure cloud-based print and scan management solution developed on the Microsoft Azure platform. This subscription-based product allows users to seamlessly print and scan documents whether they’re working from their office, home office, or a combination of both. Businesses benefit from enhanced security, detailed reporting, and potential cost savings with comprehensive tracking and management of users and devices—all in one platform.
The result? A simple and secure print and scan infrastructure that is flexible, has more security controls, and is built for new ways of working.
Want to learn more?
Register for the on-demand webinar to learn how uniFLOW Online can transform your print and scan environment here.
Or head to the Canon website to contact an expert.
