Ah the printer. Work horse of business communication for decades. Most organizations indicate that printing is critical or important to their business activities. Even when we think most of our business is done electronically, we still print a lot of documents.
Some industries are more paper-intensive than others. Healthcare, government and financial services still rely on printing for numerous business processes. People need to print forms, certain processes require one or more signatures and a lot of information is just easier to read when it’s printed. Regardless of your business, a lot of it still runs on paper.
A lot of the information you print may be sensitive or subject to regulations. 70 percent of businesses admit to experiencing one or more print-related data breaches, yet few have an effective print security strategy to mitigate the risk of a data breach. If you think about what and how you print, there are a lot of times when anyone could pick up a printout and go anywhere with it. The possibility is high that regulated or sensitive information can easily get into the wrong hands.
This makes your printer an insider threat, since anyone inside the organization can typically print anything they please.
This recent article in HIT Leaders & News entitled The print station: The forgotten frontier for data breaches shares five tips on ways to mitigate the risk of print-related data breaches.
Photo credit Steve R.