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Quocirca research reveals that enterprises place a low priority on print security despite over 60% admitting that they have experienced a print-related data breach.
Any data breach can be damaging for any company, leaving it open to fines and causing damage to its reputation and undermining customer confidence. In the UK alone, the Ponemon Institute estimates that in 2013, the average organisational cost to a business suffering a data breach is now £2.04m, up from £1.75m in the previous year.
As the boundaries between personal and professional use of technology become increasingly blurred, the need for effective data security has never been greater. While many businesses look to safeguard their laptops, smartphones and tablets from external and internal threats, few pay the same strategic attention to protecting the print environment. Yet it remains a critical element of the IT infrastructure. Over 75% of enterprises in a recent Quocirca study indicating that print is critical or very important to their business activities.
The print landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade. Local single function printers have given way to the new breed of networked multifunction peripherals (MFPs). With print, fax, copy and advanced scanning capabilities, these devices have evolved to become sophisticated document capture and processing hubs.
While they have undoubtedly brought convenience and enhanced user productivity to the workplace, they also pose security risks. They have built in network connectivity, along with hard disk and memory storage, MFPs are susceptible to many of the same security vulnerabilities as any networked device.
Meanwhile, the move to a centralised MFP environment means more users are sharing devices. Without controls, documents can be collected by unauthorised users – either accidentally or maliciously. Similarly, confidential or sensitive documents can be routed in seconds to unauthorised recipients, through scan to email, scan to file and scan to cloud storage functionality. Further controls are required as employees print more and more direct from mobile devices.
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