Cloud adoption has witnessed a humongous growth over the past year. Cloud infrastructure has mainly proved to be essential when it comes to assisting businesses to adapt to remote working, alongside allowing them to become very flexible and resilient during unpredictable times.
While businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, edge computing adoption also continues to expand owing to hyper-scale and IoT providers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google. These providers develop solutions that help them distribute their cloud capabilities.
Mitigating risk and improving efficiency by moving the print infrastructure to the cloud
Organizations continue to assess the effectiveness of their existing IT infrastructure; now that companies plan to re-open their office premises. There stands an opportunity to make a significant change in efficiency and cost savings – this can be done by relocating the print infrastructure to the cloud.
Cloud printing platforms have the ability to deliver an effective method of tracking, securing print, and monitoring, both in the office and home environment. There are several untrusted devices like the printers used at homes, that pose a threat to enterprise security.
Diverse and evolving market
It is important to ensure that you select the right cloud print service provider and platform. As the market evolves, we can witness a number of approaches to the same. On one hand, some of the print manufacturers offer a fully managed cloud service, and on the other hand, independent software vendors are said to be a competent solution for organizations with a mixed fleet environment.
Factors to consider:
1.Hybrid or Serverless
Serverless models might be a better approach for smaller organizations with limited workstations and printers; this model is said to be an efficient approach when it comes to cutting short on overheads, IT administration, and print server costs.
Hybrid models are said to be a better choice for organizations looking to eliminate their print servers or having security concerns. It is deployed under a single management platform that eases the efforts when it comes to saving costs while cutting down the costs.
2.VPN
Though most cloud printing solutions are hosted on cloud servers, they still require VPN tunnels to connect to the network; this limits accessibility. Starting from overheads in terms of performance, costs, installation, and management, there are several problems while using VPN to connect to the print platform. VPN also has the ability to create unnecessary security weaknesses as it enables access to the entire network when compromised in any way.
3.Document Security
The print platform is expected to allow either compression of print jobs or handle a part of the same locally rather than sending all the data to the cloud. A cloud-based platform is said to keep the print jobs on the local network, hidden behind the firewall. The data exchanged between the client and cloud should be encrypted to safeguard the stream from being captured through a man-in-the-middle attack.
4.Multi-tenant Platform
Platforms hosted by single tenants are competitively more expensive than the same hosted by multiple tenants. The former provides better overall security alongside giving rise to availability risks owing to manual maintenance and update processes.
The latter is usually highly configurable; it also includes solid security that is managed by the service provider. Multi-tenant platform is basically like a shared dorm – it helps you cut down on costs. Customers should be constantly informed about the upcoming changes that are to be introduced into the platform.
