There’s currently a lot of buzz surrounding cloud print management, and for good reason.
For decades now, viable alternatives to print servers have been few and far between, so organizations reluctantly tended to stick with the devil they knew. But a perfect nexus of technological trends (e.g., software as a service, or SaaS) and advances (e.g., mobile devices, exponentially faster WAN connections) has now made it possible for those same organizations to envision a print environment that offers more flexibility, more convenience and similar functionality but without all the attendant hardware costs. Quite simply, cloud printing just makes sense for a lot of organizations that are tired of investing inordinate amounts of time, resources and money in operating and maintaining a traditional print infrastructure when they don’t have to.
In fact, when weighing the benefits of traditional versus cloud printing infrastructures, there are some compelling reasons to adopt cloud print management sooner rather than later—and these reasons are strong indications of why cloud printing is such a rapidly growing trend among today’s SMB sector. Listing them all would probably number in the hundreds, but here are five of the most important ones:
- Cloud printing is less resource intensive: As mentioned above, it takes countless hours, toil and expense to keep a physical print environment up and running. Whether you’re using print servers, direct IP printing or some form of a virtual solution, traditional print management is a resource vortex. With cloud print management, everything is centralized and universally accessible, making basic administration easier. No servers are onsite demanding to be rebooted, upgraded and otherwise maintained.
- You always know how much you’re paying: SaaS has transformed the enterprise because it turns expenditures on physical hardware and one-time software into a predictable, easily quantifiable line item. Whereas the hardware needed to power traditional print environments needs to be purchased, constantly maintained, and replaced when it suddenly fails, SaaS cloud printing is a set fee that really only changes when you change your type of service.
- Current-gen technology stays current: Following on from point (2), one-time hardware and software purchases invariably become outdated, but it costs a lot of money to upgrade. That’s one reason why so many organizations are still running operating systems that were end-of-life’d years ago. With a cloud printing solution, you theoretically should have ongoing access to the latest cloud print management technology. Upgrades are bundled into the solution itself.
- Increased functionality without increased hassle: Some, albeit not all, cloud printing solutions aim to provide greater extensibility than their traditional on-premises counterparts. This means that they can be enhanced with plugins and apps that provide sought-after, enterprise-quality features like secure printing without the need for an additional software package.
- Your cloud printing solution grows with you: The cloud can typically scale up to accommodate fairly large print environments, but most conventional on-premises solutions (except for PrinterLogic) need to be augmented with more and more hardware to do the same.
PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) delivers all these benefits. And then it goes one step further. Instead of being vulnerable to wide-area network (WAN) outages, PrinterLogic SaaS provides the highest possible availability from a cloud printing solution. It does this by leveraging proven direct IP printing to create robust client–printer connections that don’t need a WAN connection. PrinterLogic SaaS even integrates seamlessly with virtual solutions like Citrix and VMware, so you can experience effortless cloud printing and cloud print management no matter what your print environment looks like.
There are at least five solid reasons to adopt cloud-based print management, but there are even more reasons to adopt PrinterLogic SaaS as your cloud printing solution. Its resiliency, ease of use and versatility set it far apart from other cloud print management solutions.