But what is the link between IT efficiency and something like print, which is clearly considered declining? You might even wonder if print is going to be around in the next few years. So, as an IT person, why should you care? Stick around and read on to find out.
The Need for IT Efficiency
Keeping up with technology development and digital transformation can be scary for the people whose jobs the tech is designed to make easier. It shouldn’t, but that’s easier said than done. The reality is that some fear they’ll get replaced by technology, and others fear that they’ll get in too deep with a solution that’ll end up causing more problems than the one before. But in IT departments, integrating tech development is non-negotiable if you want to get rid of IT pains.
IT teams are dependent on new technology as it helps them be more productive in their everyday work. Your need for efficiency is sparked by the ungiving role IT has been forced to play, having had to focus your attention on systems upkeep, responding to user needs, updating print drivers across an organization, patching security holes, regulating devices, deploying and updating hardware, and much more.
In the current IT landscape, IT leaders like yourself increasingly need to anticipate emerging trends, articulate the organization’s vision and strategy to stakeholder groups and manage digital transformation initiatives. You’ve become internal evangelizers and your role has transitioned from mainly technical to primarily strategic and collaborative. But you already knew that. So let’s get back to the efficiency part.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, you need to continually adjust your strategies to stay ahead of the curve and understand what solutions and technologies are best suited for the needs of your organization. Nowadays, companies need their CIOs to act as proactive decision-makers, leading shifts in IT architecture and guiding the tech product roadmap.
To keep up with business demands and on-mission critical tasks, your best bet is efficiency-promoting technology ... Like cloud-based printing. Essentially, with cloud, you can optimize your IT team’s efficiency with a simplified print driver concept.
The Cloud-Based Print Management Solution
Print drivers are a massive source of pain for IT teams because of their complexity. They require constant monitoring, updating, and troubleshooting to ensure that printing stays operational and secure. This gets time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to handle for IT teams already dealing with an exhaustive amount of IT projects. On top of that, because of the many brands and models of printers available for organizations, it can be difficult for IT teams to stay on top of new drivers and ensure compatibility with their systems.
Even if you try to work with a single print manufacturer, you can meet challenges associated with the different print device generations, finishing options, print language, supported operating systems, and varying versions of the driver or the small printers that are often purchased outside of the contracts.
Fundamentally, print drivers were designed to be a piece of software on a computer that converts data to be printed into a format that a printer can understand. Over time, as layers of complexity have been built into them, managing print drivers has become a task in itself. IT teams have been forced to develop processes to handle print driver updates, using print servers as a distribution platform. This, along with all the other tasks already allocated to IT, it’s no wonder migraines have become part of the deal. But it’s time to change that.
With cloud print software, this painstaking migraine goes away, thanks to a simplified infrastructure, including a modern print driver, smart print devices, a web-based UI, and efficiency-promoting features, like full finishing options, global updates and patching, and remote access.
IT simply installs a client containing a universal print driver that includes full finishing options for all major manufacturers on users’ devices. Any updates in policy or device commands are pulled down to the client on a regular basis so that users are always up to date and can print to all available devices, irrespective of manufacturer. Let’s call this the modern print driver.
With a modern print driver (like YSoft EveryonePrint), it becomes possible to manage multiple print devices via a full-featured single driver – resulting in less time strain for IT, less hassle for end-users, and a better print experience for all.
In the following section, we’ll show you how cloud printing services help sustain IT efficiency, and just how important a role the modern print driver plays.
9 Ways Cloud Printing Sustain IT Efficiency
1. The Modern Print Driver
The modern print driver, unlike standard universal print drivers, is designed to work across all printer models and brands. A universal print driver is one single manufacturer driver that enables consistent print performance on that manufacturer’s devices. The modern print driver steps it up a notch.
Even with a universal print driver, since they come up short in a multi-vendor print environment, many IT teams will end up still having to administer and maintain a repository of multiple print drivers to manage their printer fleet, taking away time from their mission-critical tasks. Opting for a cloud solution with a fully-featured single driver (aka the modern print driver), you and your team will never have to worry about printer drivers again – we'll do that for you.
How does the driver function? Once a user authenticates themselves at any of your fleet’s devices, YSoft Everyoneprint seamlessly formats the job, including all finishing options, and quickly sends it to a chosen printer (regardless of brand), helping users to leverage the best of their print devices.
With a true cloud platform, the print driver can move from being a point of frustration to a business enabler.
2. Centralized Administration
Cloud-based computing can help improve IT efficiency in a variety of ways. By utilizing a cloud-based print management infrastructure, you can enable your organization to access resources on-demand and create a more agile IT environment that can scale according to need – at your pace. A native cloud print setup makes it easy to manage your print infrastructure from a simple web-based UI, remotely accessible, without requiring your IT team to be onsite, so they can spend time devoted to higher-value services.
3. IT Automation
Since the global pandemic, more IT teams are turning to automation technologies to automate time-consuming tasks and reduce costs. This has resulted in accelerated cloud adoption as organizations have navigated the pandemic’s impact.
With the enhanced print driver concept found in YSoft EveryonePrint, we enable the automation of driver provisioning on endpoints, the update process for users, print manufacturers, and devices, all the OS, print queues, and sites.
4. Easy & Fast Accessibility
With cloud-based print management systems like YSoft EveryonePrint, users can access and print from any location, as long as they have an internet connection. These systems feature a serverless PC and Mac client which is fully compatible with the modern print driver, including the ability to store print jobs locally until released for print. Once a user gets authenticated at any of your fleet’s devices, the platform will seamlessly format the job including all finishing options, and quickly send it to the printer, fast and hassle-free.
The platform enables self-service for users to add or search for devices available to them. It’s also possible to set up location-aware printers, giving users who work across different branches, offices, or departments seamless and secure access to a print device across any network or location.
5. Facilitated Security Management
From an IT security perspective, it’s important to consider the security aspects when targeting the improvements of a system. The cloud-native single driver helps organizations of all sizes reduce risks associated with attacks and security breaches by providing secure access to printer devices and the data associated with them.
Thanks to its managed print driver experience, the full-featured single driver automatically stays up to date, reducing the testing and approval workload to ensure easy deployment and compliance with the highest security standards.
Monthly releases take security into account, ensuring your cloud print solution is always up to date with standard compliance (like GDPR, OWASP, CCM, and more), ensuring ongoing protection across confidentiality, integrity, and availability for your systems and data.
6. Streamlined Costs (and Savings)
With a cloud print solution, you get to optimize your IT budget, saving time and money. Having to troubleshoot print driver conflicts and manage updates inevitably takes time and burns a hole in the IT budget. With a full-featured single driver like the one you’ll find in YSoft EveryonePrint, all updates are included right into the driver. This makes it easy to add or remove devices without having to install another driver, enabling significant economies of scale for your team and organization.
7. Remote Management
We touched on this briefly in point 2. Truth is, with a proper cloud-based print management system functioning off a single full-featured driver, your team will be able to access and manage your print infrastructure from any remote location. That means your team can manage all activities on the system, workstations, servers, or client endpoints from anywhere. While on-site visits could be appropriate at some point, they’ll be far from habitual. This saves travel time and makes managing your print infrastructure a breeze.
8. Hassle-free Scalability
True cloud systems like YSoft EveryonePrint are scalable by design. One key aspect of IT efficiency is how well your integrated systems and processes handle business growth. With a cloud print infrastructure, your team can accelerate the business’s digital transformation and cloud journey—at your pace, your way, without running into issues with your print environment.
Because true cloud systems are scalable, they allow businesses to grow and easily expand their cloud-based print management services as needed. This allows everyone in IT to manage cloud print effectively, no matter the extent, and adhere to business growth as it occurs.
9. Less Helpdesk Calls
As if the first eight points weren’t enough, let’s talk about the constant stream of helpdesk calls we all know and love. Or something along those lines...
With a true cloud platform, you’ll start seeing a noteworthy decline in helpdesk calls. How’s that made possible? With automation, a simplified infrastructure, and stable connectivity, solutions like YSoft EveryonePrint offers simplification of common IT helpdesk pain points such as connecting users to a printer, whether they are onboarded, at their home location or when visiting another site.
Our modern print driver lets organizations easily enable end-users in a self-service model to be able to print securely to any device (all major print manufacturers), from either desktop or mobile, with full complex print driver commands (duplex, staple, punch etc.), without having to call on IT for help.
In other words, this solution is made to account for all common, non-essential helpdesk requests, empowering your colleagues to confidently leverage the infrastructure from the get-go, free from having to reach out for support on a weekly basis. Ultimately, that results in less risk for your IT team to be pulled away from core business projects.
FAQs on IT Efficiency
1. Why Should you be Hosting Your Print Infrastructure in The Cloud?
Opting for a cloud print solution allows your IT team to let go of tedious and repetitive manual printer maintenance, and enjoy the following benefits: increased accessibility, improved scalability, reduced costs, enhanced security, easy management, automation, and significant improvements in IT efficiency. Cloud print infrastructures come with a simplified architecture, consistently good print experiences (regardless of printer brands), as well as centralized administration capabilities.
2. How can I Reduce IT Costs While still Maintaining IT Efficiency?
Investing in automation and cloud-based solutions can help reduce IT costs while maintaining high IT efficiency. Additionally, regularly reviewing and streamlining processes can also help reduce costs. Cloud print solutions can enable significant economies of scale for IT teams and organizations due to a simplified, yet more resilient and reliable print infrastructure.
Final Points
As the cloud market expands, and more businesses are drawn to the numerous benefits to yield from a cloud-based print management system, it becomes more and more important for businesses to evaluate their options from an IT efficiency standpoint. While the industry is booming with options, ultimately, you’ll need to consider what solutions best meet the needs of your organization while enabling significant improvements in IT efficiency.
Going with a feature-rich solution that maintains resilience despite sporting a simplified infrastructure means your IT team can finally take a step back from print management, and let the infrastructure run smoothly in the background while you re-focus on the work that matters to you, for the growth of your people and organization.
At Y Soft, we’re optimizing IT efficiency by simplifying the print driver concept. This means you only have to install a driver once and leverage the many advantages found in the full-featured single driver across your entire organization, easily and hassle-free.
But don’t just take our word for it.
If you’re curious about how a solution like YSoft EveryonePrint can make a compelling change for your IT Team, look no further.
In this case study, you’ll learn how Lyngby-Taarbaek Municipality leveraged the modern print driver to get their IT efficiency game to the next level:
Lyngby-Taarbaek Municipality Case Study