Many people concentrate on the PCs in the office when it comes to network security. However, print security is becoming increasingly important. They have data streams like PCs and other devices, but they often don't have the same level of security.
How Are Printers Vulnerable?
There is a lot of sensitive data that gets printed by a typical business. It may be private employee data, contact information for clients or information valuable to your competition. Printers have data streams that can be vulnerable to cyber thieves if they aren't secured by end-to-end encryption. With this encryption, a hacker who gets into the stream only sees the encryption code instead of your sensitive data. Printers can also be vulnerable simply by holding printed data on their trays. Anyone who sees these sheets can read the data on them. Those pages may even be stolen.
Locking Your Printer
In addition to encryption, every printer should have a lock so that printed pages can be kept safely inside the machines. Older printers often don't have either of these security measures, so it's important to have a late-model printer that has the latest security features. With a locking tray, The worker who prints out the pages can keep them safely inside of the printer until he has time to retrieve them. This keeps them safe from anyone reading the sensitive data or even walking away with it.
Security Software
Like the PCs in the office, printers have security software, and it often has to be updated so that the latest security patches are put in place. This is a big part of print security today, so your printer should be one that has good security software in place as well as regular updates as issues with the security are discovered. This keeps the printer as secure as possible. If your printer is an older model without much in the way of security, it's time to upgrade.
If you want your company's print security to be the best possible, call us now to find out more about what we can do to keep it that way.
