The Print Landscape: Balancing Traditional and Cloud Services in a Remote-Work World

Traditional print infrastructure is often a mishmash of devices, printer drivers, and software solutions all sourced from different providers. And in a remote-work environment, these patchwork solutions need to be extended even further to support a distributed workforce.

Quick takeaways:

• Traditional print solutions are complex and come with significant IT burden
• Print servers cost $2,400 to provision and $1,900 to run annually
• Managing print services in the cloud reduces cost and modernizes infrastructure
• 64% of organizations in the US are already using cloud print services

While traditional solutions can be managed centrally with dedicated print servers, they also come with a significant IT burden, higher costs, and vulnerabilities that expose your organization to risks. New research from Quocirca has shown that the average organization operates an average of 3 print servers, which each cost:

• £1,900 ($2,400) to provision
• £1,500 ($1,900) to run annually

Even with the increasing costs of print servers, and the benefits of moving away from them, more organizations are increasing their reliance on them to support remote workers. In the US:

• 10% of organizations have either eliminated or reduced print servers
• 61% of organizations have increased the number of print servers
• 29% haven’t changed

A huge opportunity that many organizations aren’t capitalizing on to reduce their print infrastructure cost and complexity is with cloud print management. Today, most organizations use both cloud print services and traditional print infrastructure. According to Quocirca:

• 64% of organizations in the US are already using cloud print services
• 32% plan to adopt cloud print services in the next 24 months
• 4% either don’t know or don’t plan to use cloud printing services

Managing these services in the cloud is not only a way to modernize your infrastructure and easily support a remote workforce, it also drives operational efficiencies and reduces environmental impact. By consolidating print management tools into one cloud platform, you can manage your users, configurations, policies, and printers from anywhere – without the need for IT maintenance.

Cloud printing is increasing in popularity, as more organizations discover the capabilities of a modern printing environment. While many organizations aren’t ready to eliminate their print servers just yet, moving to hybrid model still offers many of the same efficiencies and cost-savings as a fully cloud-based model, and we’ll see even more organizations reaping the benefits of a hybrid model over the next few years.