Why IT's appetite for onsite print server management is dwindling
by Ken Weilerstein
Today, enterprises need to use as much of their IT resources as possible to help with mission-critical business and revenue-building opportunities. All too often however, IT wastes valuable time and money overseeing print operations. The answer is to eliminate local print servers. If you’re undecided, take a look at some of the ways that an on-premises print infrastructure taxes company resources:
To stay competitive, businesses are constantly evolving — relocating print servers during renovations, company expansions and other business changes is not uncommon. Plus, during periods of expedited business growth, new print servers have to be introduced.
Consider some of the tasks involved every time IT employees set up a print server:
To help reduce the work of setting up and breaking down print servers, enterprises often choose to consolidate their print servers to a data center. Centralized data centers may free up some IT resources, but they also make it difficult for IT employees with print expertise to handle maintenance issues that data center employees can’t. In addition, when users issue print jobs, these jobs are sent out to the data center and then back to the print device — this can constitute a long trip through less than optimal connections, resulting in long waits for print jobs. And if the power in the data center goes out, everyone has to scramble.
Whether your print servers are located on-premises, in a data center or both, IT employees have to devote time to ongoing maintenance, and they often take a reactive approach. With the poor visibility into printer performance that comes with many on-premises print infrastructures, IT employees are often forced to wait until maintenance issues occur to service equipment — leading to more lost productivity than would result from a proactive approach.
Finding ways to reduce overhead costs is just good business, especially when reducing costs makes a company more agile. Take a look at some of the many operational and capital expenses associated with an internal print infrastructure:
Print-related management and administrative hours alone can distract your IT workforce from more pressing strategic activities — not to mention the cost of up-front hardware and software purchases. In addition to those listed above, other costs include workflow interruptions due to downtime, the inability to easily scale up during growth spurts, overtime costs, legal fees — the list goes on. Yet, IT departments ignore these costly downsides, and continue to invest in print servers, data centers and other internal print infrastructure.
According to Gartner, “the main obstacle to a more widespread printer server elimination is that most enterprises are unwilling to tamper with the basic Windows Server printing functionality and are lacking market awareness of the solutions.”1 Whether or not you are undecided about outsourcing print server management, it is clear that after weighing the costs of an on-premises print infrastructure, a plan should be put into place.
RICOH Print Platform Cloud Service may be exactly what you need to help reduce the burden of print management and free up IT to focus on more value-driven business. Plus, our scalable, fully-managed cloud environment offers an easy-to-manage, monthly per-user subscription fee.
1 "Hype Cycle for Imaging and Print Services, 2017." Gartner, Inc. August 2, 2017.
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