5 Ways You Are Loosing Sensitive Documents When Printing

In world full of data protection and “GDPR” it’s more crucial than ever to ensure you are protecting sensitive information, printing is one of the most common causes of data leaks within the office environment, some you might not even realise you are doing.

So take a look below at the top 5 ways you are loosing sensitive documents when printing.

1. Leaving them in the printer tray. 

You know that stack of documents lying on your printer? That’s wasteful. But it’s a threat too. In that stack might be someone’s pay review, your customers’ data or your company’s financial plans and roadmap.

If you don’t want that stuff just lying around, make sure your printer’s smart enough to authenticate your users before it prints out their documents.

Looking for a smarter printer? Get in touch today: 01603 481995 or drop us a message.

 

2. Sending files without password-protecting them.

You need to scan a file and send it to your colleague John. You’re in a hurry. So you scan the document really quick and mail it to John – the wrong John. Oops.

Get yourself a printer that helps you password-protect files.

 

3. Saving the sensitive files in an unsafe folder. 

When someone needs to scan a document and then save it to the cloud, they usually need to save that scanned file somewhere local first.

It might be their desktop or some local folder. But if they forget to delete that file after copying it to a shared Dropbox or Google Drive or wherever, you’ve got a problem.

Make sure you’ve got a printer that’s smart enough to automatically save your users’ files in the cloud for them. And they won’t leave sensitive files lying around.

 

4. Getting someone else to print for you.

Sometimes remote workers need something printed before they come in. A common way around this is to ask someone else to print the file for them.

But if they save that sensitive file in an unsafe place, you might be in trouble.

If your printer supports mobile printing, your remote workers won’t need to go through someone else to print their files. And this won’t be a problem.

 

5. Leaving the data on the printer’s hard drive. 

You probably don’t think of your printer as a computer. But the smartest printers have hard drives and they’re central to the way information flows through your company.

So make sure your printer automatically overwrites its own hard drive for you. More important, make sure the printer’s disk is well encrypted too.

 

Want to find out more about smart printing? Get in touch today: 01603 481995 or drop us a message.

 

Are you using your photocopier to it’s FULL potential?

Are you using your photocopier to it’s FULL potential?

So the little workhorse that sits in the corner of your room today has more potential than you may think, a lot of suppliers forget to mention some of the little handy features these machines have, from printing banners, to sending faxes to an email addresses. Today, we are here to give you 5 great features you never knew your photocopier had!

Banner Printing

Did you know it is possible to print pages larger than A3 on your photocopier? Many manufacturers these day’s supply a feature called “Banner Printing” Taking a very long landscaped image (Similar to the one below) and being able to print this via the machines bypass tray.

Image result for ricoh banner printing

Fax Forwarding

With the modern office moving away from older technologies such as fax and moving towards a more digital path many companies still receive documentation via a fax machine or option placed on their photocopier, with many devices there is a feature where you can divert the fax from being printed to be sent as a JPEG/PDF to a specified to a network folder or email address within the company. Helping reduce waste and energy.

Watermarks 

What if we told you that your photocopier can print letter-headed paper for you? Save money on having headed paper printed by a third party printers by doing them yourself, with features such as “Watermarks” you can use them for more than just overlaying text like “Copyright” or “Confidential” and instead add your own overlay images to the pages.

Custom Home Screens (One touch short cuts) 

Many modern printers use “Smart” panels these days looking very similar to your Android or Apple devices, giving more functionality by moving the “Apps” around the screen, adding custom wallpapers etc but these panels also have the ability to create jobs and save them as shortcuts on the home screen. If for example you had to photocopy a booklet which had stapling features, page numbers etc it can be frustrating having to remember those settings next time round. Many devices these days have the ability to programme those settings as a pre-set and add it to the home screen of the photocopier. Helping reduce time, frustration, notepads the lot!

Print and Copy Tracking

 Last of our handy features is probably one of the best! Did you know you can lock your photocopier down with a pin code so you can monitor the volume of jobs being photocopied or printed on the device? As a standard feature many machines have the ability to set restrictions to help manage or charge users for the printing they do, this can be a very handy feature to help bring down those costs. However we should mention that although this feature is free, it’s limited on it’s functionality in most cases, generally it would be recommended to use “Print Management Software” Such as “Papercut” which gives a vast amount of flexibility from using swipe cards and bio-metric scanners to log into the machines to detailed reporting or adding filters and restrictions to force double sided documents, duplicates, archiving, word filtering.

– To learn more about Papercut click here.

That’s it!

– We hope you enjoyed this little insight, there are so many more amazing features today’s printers and photocopiers can do, if you’d like to learn more tips, tricks or helpful features drop us a message or call: 01603 481995