Determining a return on investment (ROI) for document security is a difficult thing to assess. Traditional calculations, like the one below, don't make sense for calculating the ROI on increasing document security. Security in this sense, is similar to car or health insurance -- it is all about 'what-if' scenarios and risk management.
In fact, implementing modern security systems and policies often result in higher labor or infrastructure costs. When thinking about the cost of security, companies are forced to think about loss prevention and not in terms of cost savings.
But coming back to the traditional ROI calculation, is it possible to offset costs with the overall gains from a print management investment where increased security is inherent?
Yes. Print management offers measurable ways to reduce costs which offset security investments, still leaving room for an ROI. Here are a few examples of the cost savings print management can offer with fact-based data coming from actual usage data. In the case of YSoft SAFEQ, customers receive this data from our Reporting module:
- The print job is purged after a defined period of time and that goes directly to cost savings (the job was not printed). Because users authenticate to initiate a print job release at the printer, many times jobs are not printer because the user didn't really need to print it.
- The print job is deleted by the user. In this scenario, the user sent a print job, realized a typo or other mistake and resends the job. At the printer, the user can delete the orignal print job saving the cost of the print job.
- With the Rule-Based Engine, rules are enforced to force black/white instead of color or duplex instead of single-sided pages. Both rules lead to reduces costs of print jobs in terms of consumables.
- The print job is allowed to be printed only at a production device since it has more than 500 pages (less cost per click), another rule enforced through the Rule-Based Engine.
- More cost saving examples can be found here.
For each of these scenarios, reports show the savings fron print jobs purged, not printed or where a cost-savings rule was enforced. This data is fact-based and speaks direct to savings.
So while determining ROI on increasing overall information security may be difficult, determing ROI on print management which includes increased document security, is easy.
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