Security usually does not add convenience to the user experience; it seems the two are often inversely proportional. Nobody wants to remember a new, complex password every 3 months, very few people get excited about that new firewall that slows everything down. And that 50 page security policy? No one will read or remember it.
Document security on the other hand, doesn’t have to be inconvenient. First, a little quiz.
Is Printing a Security Risk?
- Are your company's confidential or sensitive documents printed on shared devices?
- Are classified documents printed outside of a secure area (e.g. on a device that is out of sight)?
- Do users leave print jobs in the print queue because of paper jams or other malfunctions (where the job can be reprinted by someone else later)?
- Do personnel without appropriate clearance have access to your printers?
If you answer yes to at least one of these questions, your company’s printing is a security risk.
Going even further, ask yourself: Is a confidential printed document considered a company asset and if it falls into the wrong hands, can it cause harm?
Print Roaming
All the security risk associated with the scenarios above disappear with implementation of YSoft SAFEQ, specifically with the Print Roaming module. With Print Roaming, the
print job is held by a dedicated print server or workstation until the
user authenticates and is authorized to release the document at any device. Only after the user authenticates at the printer is the print job released and printed while the employee can oversee it and collect it from the print tray.
Convenient? Yes.
Generally speaking, Print Roaming adds
Authentication, Authorization and Accountability to the print environment. Authentication and authorization allow the print environment to know who the user is and provides a personalized list of features and approved functions for the user. This not only applies to printing, but also for copying and scanning if the device has these capabilities. For example because the device knows who the user is, scanning workflows can be personalized (e.g. scan to my email, to my home folder). That’s convenient.
You’ll notice a couple of things after implementing a print management solution:
- Users no longer have to send a print job to another printer when the closest printer runs out of paper. They simply go to any other device and print.
- No longer will there be stacks of uncollected print jobs in the print tray or on surrounding tables.
Security is convenient for you as a print administrator and for users with Print Roaming. At least with print, copy and scan, convenient security is not an oxymoron.