The Cloud and the route to the destination for your critical output have never been further apart. Moreover, getting print from A to B has never been more complicated.
Way, way back, before "The Cloud," we had the data center. Inside the data center was the mainframe that did all the important printing that an enterprise required to communicate with their customers. Printing was easy because the only printer you could use was physically attached to the mainframe with a big, fat cable. Job done.
Then someone thought that the important printing might also be done on the office printers, and LRS wrote some mainframe software that sent the important print to network attached office printers. Lots of people were very happy.
That was 45 years ago, and developers at LRS still write software that manages important output from the data center. However, the data center location is more likely to be "the Cloud" now. The data today usually comes from many servers, not just one big one, running many different corporate applications such as:
- SAP
- Oracle
- EPIC
- Cerner
- Citrix
- Veeva
- ...and many more
They are often running in the Cloud, and they all produce critical output that needs to be printed.
Of course, things are not connected by real cables anymore, which makes the security guys get very nervous about moving data from their nice secure servers to random printers via who knows what network. This is especially true when this sensitive data is floating around our heads for anyone to sniff it. Security staff want to make sure that only the people who should be printing can do printing, and that only the owner can retrieve those documents from the printer.
Since Covid, many HR departments have decided that people may be allowed to work at home. "Thank you, HR" say most people (except the security team)! But now people want to print or view the important information at home or trigger a print and ask someone else who is physically in the office to release it from an office printer so a business process can continue.
Cloud adoption has also brought the "there's an App for that!" culture. Modern enterprises embrace work Apps to make their customer-facing business work far more smoothly. Some examples include:
- The in-store customer assistant with a mobile tablet, generating documents from applications in the Cloud and needing to print to the nearest in-store printer
- The healthcare worker in a patient's house who needs, right now, to print a barcode label for the patient's blood sample that contains the unique reference provided by the HealthCare Patient Record system
- Your parts supplier, logistics partner, or "affiliate" company that follows the policy "it's your important print data but we need you to it print on our printers"
Oh, and by the way, all these people and their devices are only connected to the public internet because the network team (quite rightly) don't want to pay for expensive VPNs anymore.
But it's not all one-way traffic. What about the other way round - starting with in-bound documents and scanning them on remote, internet-only devices (MFPs and even mobile devices for end-user convenience) and needing to get them up into your Cloud-based applications? It has to work both ways.
Cloud, Internet-Only, Data Center, MFP, Active/Active, Active/Passive, TLS, Load-Balance, Firewall, Contingency, Mobility, Security, Flexibility, SaaS/Paas, Audit, Printer Agnostic, Encryption, Alias/Delegation, Critical Print, IPDS, IPPS, Transform, Multi-Factor Authentication. End-User Experience.
Printing (and scanning!) is easy. Right?!
Well, it still can be.
"Any output from any platform to any destination."
That's what LRS have been doing for a very long time and will continue to do so. We provide a single, stable, scalable and flexible platform to continue printing critical output from central systems as technology changes and enterprises follow. Plus, our solutions can do all your other printing on the same platform too - workplace, server-less, labels, whatever.
We would love to hear about your end-use cases. Nothing makes us happier than showing you how we can help you implement and streamline an Output Management platform to cover it ALL.