The recent 2021 KPMG CEO Outlook Pulse Survey suggests that 45% of business leaders don’t expect a return to regular business operations until 2022, while 31% think it will happen later this year.
Additionally, almost a quarter of those leaders believe their business has changed forever. But what does this mean for MPS dealers, and how should they adjust to this new normal so that they continue to deliver (and even improve) customer service?
We can’t discuss this new normal in the context of print management without talking about the rise in working from home and how it’s permanently altered the composition of print fleets. Employees have demonstrated they work from home just as efficiently as at the office, if not more so. They’ve become accustomed to the extra hours in a day for family time, socializing, exercising—or even putting in additional work when urgent deadlines are looming.
Microsoft’s recent Work Trend Index reflects this, suggesting employees are ready and willing to adopt a hybrid way of working in which they spend 2-3 days a week remote and the remainder of the time in their office. This month, SAP confirmed that it’s rolling out hybrid working for its 100,000 global employees. In a more radical move, one of the UK’s biggest banks, Nat West, confirmed that just 13% of staff would be returning to full-time office work when government advice on working from home is relaxed later this year.
An Overdue Workplace Revolution?
Cloud technology has made this shift in working practices possible and sustainable, and COVID has provided the catalyst for a seismic workplace shift that many analysts say has been long overdue. But if MPS dealers want to support customer desire for hybrid working in the long run, they need a fleet management strategy that enables businesses to print to networked devices with equal reliability and security from their home or office. This means that a dealer’s choice of print management software is now even more critical and will decide the extent to which they can meet the challenges of fleet management in our post-pandemic world.
Having different print management applications for the same fleet has never been an optimal solution for dealers or customers, and this is even more apparent in hybrid working environments. At a very high level, dealers need to find a single platform (preferably cloud-based) for all managed print services. This solution should remotely monitor all consumables and automatically handle replenishment while facilitating safe, secure printing regardless of location. Other vital considerations include ease of use, reliable data flow and demonstrable compliance with data protection directives—all while being sufficiently agile and flexible to support customers as they expand operations or as market forces bring about further shifts and changes.
With so much to think about, it’s helpful to explore several critical areas of print management solutions. These aspects will determine the success with which dealers can support their customers in the future:
Cloud-Native Architecture
If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth looking seriously at cloud-based print management solutions. Regardless of where your customers are located in terms of hybrid working, they are likely to have a more distributed workforce. Hybrid working makes a cloud-based print management solution more important than ever. It’s the only way dealers can deliver secure managed print services with the levels of support expected by customers while still being able to make a profit. But not all cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are created equally. Those developed natively as cloud-based solutions bring distinct advantages in driving feature deployment and supporting deep integration efforts.
Cyberthreats and Secure Printing
The pandemic has had a significant impact on the office technology industry. However, inadequate IT security is likely to be a larger—and more potentially damaging and enduring—issue in the long run. A security breach creates a significant financial impact; costs are incurred to investigate a violation, hire lawyers, inform those impacted and pay fines and damages.
Then there’s reputational impact. Finding and retaining customers is hard enough in this post-COVID world. But it will be even more challenging for a dealer that’s lost or exposed private user data, even if it was an innocent error or because of a cyberattack.
For that reason, security needs to be a top priority in the new normal. However, despite the constant warnings from industry experts, many dealers are still leaving their data and sensitive customer information vulnerable to attack and exploitation. It can be a daunting task—maintaining security in the MPS world requires a comprehensive, holistic approach that covers data security and compliance. Ask yourself these questions to get a sense of how strong your print fleet security policy is:
- Data security and compliance: Does your print management solution ensure all data is operated within an information security management system compliant with ISO/IEC 27001:2014 to ensure maximum data confidentiality, integrity and availability? Does it comply with applicable standards and regulations such as EU GDPR and AICPA SOC2? Although GDPR is a European Union (EU) regulation, it’s worth noting that it impacts any company, organization or individual around the world that handles data from EU citizens. Therefore, U.S. organizations should still be well-versed in the rules.
- Device security: Does your print management solution provide specific features to ensure that devices are kept updated and security policies are enforced?
- Infrastructure security: Is your print management solution continuously tested and audited for cybersecurity risks by a dedicated team of highly skilled security specialists? Is the data collection agent (DCA) that you install inside your customer’s network providing an adequate level of protection from code tampering and malicious code execution?
- User security: Can your print management solution deliver single sign-on, two-factor authentication, granular user permissions, PII masking and the many other features available to ensure the security of user accounts and permissions?
A Vendor-Agnostic Solution
Look for a print management solution that can monitor and manage devices from multiple manufacturers. Most organizations have a complex print fleet that’s grown organically over time to include various brands and a mix of devices. Working from home has accelerated this trend, and the emergence of hybrid working as a viable alternative to traditional office life means it’s unlikely that many customers will use a single print vendor across their fleet.
Partnerships and Integration
In today’s interconnected world, businesses can’t be successful if they operate in isolation, and this is true for print management solutions. Look for a vendor that partners with a wide variety of technology companies to ensure that key functionality (such as embedded connectivity or direct integration with critical applications and systems in the document solutions space) are easily accessible.
Integration with HP Smart Devices Services, for example, allows dealers who are also HP partners to remotely diagnose and fix many hardware problems without any onsite intervention. Similarly, a print management solution that can integrate with Microsoft Universal Print allows customers with legacy print devices to connect directly into Microsoft’s cloud-based print management service with a single secure sign-on across multiple printers. This allows employees to print from any location to a networked machine. From that point on, it’s the employee’s verifiable identity and not a specific machine, device or site that allows them to connect to the corporate network and print their documents. This makes it ideal for hybrid and remote workers and simplifies printing for workers in more informal office settings where staff no longer have their own desks or cubicles.
Conclusion
If the KPMG and Microsoft research we opened this discussion with proves correct, then the future of the workplace is hybrid. That means the future of printing, managed print and print device security is cloud-based. Cloud print and remote print management are powerful tools that can support MPS providers in delivering a superior, differentiated service at a lower price point. However, they introduce potential (but manageable) dangers to the MPS model, such as a much larger attack surface and the risk of falling afoul of complex global privacy regulations.
That’s why MPS dealers will need to be equally well-versed in distributed IT infrastructure and cybersecurity as they are in toner and consumables management. It’s another aspect of the new normal that we all need to get used to and adapt to as our industry continues to evolve and mature. It’s a sentiment echoed by Quocirca in its Printing in the Hybrid Workplace Study, which states that “…cloud will be an enabler for the new normal print environment. The need for a platform that can more easily scale to meet the needs of a hybrid workplace and provide the levels of availability required for such a workforce is becoming more apparent.”
Remember, however, that even in the new normal, one fact still holds true: we all work in a highly competitive market. Those dealers who best understand cloud-based printing and print management—and can make both as painless as possible for customers—will be the ones who succeed.
