The shared printer is often the weakest security point in an office. Anyone walking past can pick up any page, and documents sit in the tray for hours. Secure printing means the document is not printed at all until its owner is standing at the machine and has identified themselves.
Payroll, contracts, customer data, financial reports — all printed to a shared machine and left waiting for someone to collect them. In most offices nothing prevents another person from taking or reading them. This is not a theoretical breach: it is the most common data leak that actually happens in companies, and the cheapest one to fix.
The employee sends the job normally from their desk, but it waits in a queue. When they walk to any machine and authenticate with a card or PIN, it prints then. If they never come, the job is cancelled after a set period. The result: no paper left in trays, and no forgotten jobs wasting supplies.
The moment printing is attributable to a person, consumption drops without any management decision at all. Personal printing falls, colour printing becomes considered, and duplicate jobs disappear. That saving usually shows within the first two months and covers the cost of the rollout itself.
It depends on the model. Recent imageRUNNER devices support it natively. Older devices, or other brands, may need an external card reader unit. We determine exactly which after a device audit.
They enter a fallback PIN at the machine's panel. There is no situation where an employee is locked out entirely — the goal is security, not obstruction.
Usually yes — secure printing is a natural part of managed print services, since both rely on the same monitoring layer. But it can be deployed on its own without a contract.
Talk to us and the ITCO team will recommend the devices and solutions that match your workload and budget.
