Secure Print: Securely Release Print Jobs
To reduce costs, IT organizations have worked to consolidate standalone printers, copiers and fax machines across the enterprise. Gone are the days in which personal printers inhabited the offices of many employees. Office workers must now share printers and multifunction devices with many co-workers in the area. While this approach results in a more optimal hardware infrastructure (e.g., higher-speed/capacity devices with lower print costs), it introduces a security issue in return. What prevents users from picking up the documents that were submitted earlier by other users? Nothing, unless a solution is implemented that prevents this from happening.
One solution to this problem involves the use of a personal identification number (PIN). Although implementations vary across printer manufacturers, the basic concept is the same. When a user submits a document for printing, he or she can enter a numeric code that gets associated with the document. When the selected printer receives the print job, it stores the print job until the user enters their PIN at the device. Once the user enters their unique PIN value, the print jobs begin printing.
Pull Printing
A more popular solution to safeguard the printing process is called “pull printing”. Many vendors refer to it by different names, such as “secure print management" or “secure print release”. This solution lets users submit documents for printing from their desktop, but the documents are held until users authenticate at a device and release them. Documents are logically pulled down to the print device by the user, hence the term pull printing.
Unlike PIN printing, secure pull printing does not require the use of PIN values. More commonly, implementations involve the use of employee badges (proximity cards) that can be used in the authentication process. If organizations require even stronger security measures, they can implement a pull printing solution that requires the user to authenticate with both their badge and a PIN value. This approach guards against the situation where an employee has misplaced their badge, or it has been stolen.
Secure print release solutions provide many business benefits. They safeguard sensitive information during the printing process; secure print release reduces cost by eliminating unclaimed documents; and it increases the mobility and productivity of users by letting them print whenever and wherever they want. In terms of security, a print release solution does ensure that an authenticated user is at the device when his/her documents are released for printing. This is critical when printers and multifunction devices are shared by many users in a workplace environment. Users no longer must race to the printer to ensure that someone else does not walk off with their documents. Without such a type of printer access control capability, businesses are at greater risk for security breaches because sensitive information can easily end up in the wrong hands.
Documents and the ability to securely print them are critical to your business. LRS® software helps you protect the information and the printing process by providing multiple layers of document security and the ability to monitor and control all aspects of document use. Once received, critical documents can be stored centrally in the LRS software until a user authenticates his or her identity at the physical device using a security badge, PIN code, or other means of authentication using MFPsecure®/Print. Administrators can also prohibit printing of certain documents, forcing users to view content online to provide a precise record of which users accessed which pages of any stored content.
LRS pull printing offers you a secure print release solution for most all popular printer hardware vendors. We work directly with these vendors to develop our secure pull printing product, MFPsecure®/Print. Maintaining those partnerships ensures secure print management for your fleet of printers to maximize them regardless of manufacturer, age or functionality.
LRS pull printing:
Levi Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS) makes printing work. As the need for secure print release solutions has increased, we’ve kept pace to offer secure print management solutions that work. Customers trust us and buy from LRS because we know how printing works. LRS secure pull printing software is highly scalable, robust, and is simple to install and implement.
For more information about our secure print management solutions, contact LRS and let us help you address your security challenges.