Print Securely: Track and Monitor Printer Usage

Organizations need an efficient way to monitor printing activity and control printing costs. Without a print auditing/tracking solution, businesses have no idea “who” prints “what”, “when” and “where.” There is no real way to effectively monitor printer usage.

The best document audit trail has comprehensive capabilities that will help an organization track costs as well as improve security and compliance with regulatory and/or internal mandates (e.g., GDPR compliance). An ideal solution tracks print activity across the entire enterprise regardless of what applications are in use or what platform users are on. It will monitor printer usage to provide a full document audit trail for data security and regulatory compliance.

Print Security Video

Print Auditing

An auditing/tracking feature is especially useful to help identify vulnerabilities that involve printed documents. It can help organizations identify the source of the breach and take whatever corrective measures are appropriate. Being able to generate a document audit trail report allows an organization to easily see where a security breach has occurred. This feature not only improves security, governance and compliance—GDPR compliance for instance—but it also helps organizations understand their total printing costs so they can take steps to reduce them.

Many print & output management solutions can track print activity, but there are distinct limitations in many cases. Ideally, you want a solution that tracks print activity (audit print practices) across the entire enterprise, regardless of application and computing platform. Otherwise, how can you track costs and improve security/compliance using a subset of metrics that represent only part of the enterprise? Any area of your business that is “off the radar screen” serves as an open invitation for malefactors. These are the particular areas that should be looked at in order to identify vulnerabilities within an organization’s printing environment.

What is in a Print Audit?

A comprehensive print auditing capability helps organizations track costs and improve security/compliance with regulatory and corporate mandates. “Trust, but verify” is still good advice today when talking about print reporting.

Document audit information provides a detailed view of an organization’s complete print environment. Customers can analyze this data using a variety of third-party utilities or with an LRS-supplied reporting tool. The tool comes with more than a dozen summary and detail reports designed to help companies identify ways to lower costs and improve document security.

The LRS^® reporting function gives decision makers a powerful tool to aid in cost reduction, compliance and security efforts. LRS software can provide reporting on audit data including: