Advice for securely printing confidential documents
Why you need secure printing
Most businesses work with confidential information. This can include employees’ tax information, salary and insurance details, medical information, legal documentation. You might also be dealing with confidential customer information, subject to the nature of your business. This can be anything from payment information and credit card numbers to home addresses – all of which is potentially valuable information for an identity thief! The responsibility lies with the business establishment and employer to keep all such information secure. Fully understanding the risk empowers businesses to tackle print security successfully. Printers need to be included as part of the risk assessment a company takes, much in the same way as servers, smart devices and cloud storage and suchlike are included. Remember, printers don’t just print, they have hard droves that store scanned data as well. The paper tray of the printer might be empty, but the hard drive may after time hold gigabytes of scanned images which of course needs to considered as a security issue. Secure Printing is now more Critical than ever before, however, there are security solutions to prevent unclaimed print jobs and protect data and sensitive documents. Here are some of them:
- PIN code or ID card access to devices, printing only when the recipient is present, ensuring confidential or private documents don’t get mixed up with others printed papers or picked up by unauthorised hands.
- Secure Printing Software. This can be an important part of your security action. Such software is Follow Me Printing and this can ensure that confidential documents are printed securely and when the author authorises it.
- Print jobs should be encrypted in transit and on the printer’s hard drive. Centrally managed software is a consideration which enables tracking and management of all print jobs on mobile or desktop.
- Other basic steps organisations should take to provide secure printing services to protect the business, include turning off all internet-based printing services within devices thus avoiding sensitive information leaving the organisation
Your printer provider should also be able to supply you with a disk wiping service at the end of your printers life or certainly ensure that the disk is wiped regularly so that nothing is stored at source and no potential hacking can occur. If you need help with printing your documents securely, then contact Mode today.
The responsibility lies with the business establishment and employer to keep all such information secure.
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