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The cloud: A driving force for digital transformation

How adopting cloud print services will help organizations stay competitive in our modern business landscape.

The growth of cloud services

As large companies continue to embrace the drive to become digital — there remains one prevailing business attitude that will never change: adapt or fail. This is particularly true when it comes to the adoption of cloud services. According to the 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Survey, 73% of organizations have at least one application in the cloud, and another 17% plan to do so in the next 12 months.¹ Additionally, research shows that organizations continue to increase their cloud budgets year over year in order to gain business efficiencies and retain their ability to continuously evolve.

In addition to companies adopting cloud services, business roles within companies are changing. IT employees in particular feel pressure to meet business demands for speed, agility and responsiveness. IT departments are rapidly evolving as C-level executives expect IT focused work to be a driving force of change. As a result, it is often IT leaders who look to adopt cloud services. By moving applications to the cloud, you can expect to reduce server population cost, decrease manual maintenance, increase efficiency, provide greater access and reliability and improve the user experience. Additionally, the cloud offers improved scalability and flexibility.

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Enterprise cloud print services

One great place to start, is to migrate your print environment to the cloud. With cloud printing, not only will you achieve greater scalability and flexibility — but you will also free up your IT resources to focus on delivering a competitive advantage. Moving print to the cloud helps fuel innovation by allowing you to refocus your resources on strategic initiatives. Enterprise cloud print services are a fully-managed, subscription-based service providing 24/7 support, monitoring and alerting. For this reason, adopting cloud print services offloads the administration and maintenance of your print ecosystem — a job that typically falls squarely in the lap of your IT department.

Some of the many benefits of cloud print services include:

Standard configuration and management
Evergreen software updates
Cost control
Consistent user experience
Document and print security
Mobile integration

With traditional print environments, organizations often run into internal challenges with MFP devices, process ownership, dispersed hardware locations, disparate operating systems on mobile devices and print latency. That's why now — more than ever — organizations are looking for a change.

The benefits of cloud services and solutions

There are many benefits to employing an enterprise cloud service such as security, cost, consistency and flexibility — to name a few. With data security threats on the rise, monitored print-security controls are increasingly important to help protect your organization's valuable information. With cloud printing, you'll get upfront features to help keep your information secure, including secure print release, swipe card or PIN authentication and device data encryption.

Large organizations that have multiple offices spread throughout the country — or even the world — will enjoy the consistent user experience across all MFPs, regardless of their location. For example, a business executive flying to a remote office to give a presentation, which contains confidential information, can locate an MFP near his temporary, remote desk and securely print his or her presentation. Additionally, employees using smartphones, tablets or laptops can easily send their print jobs to the cloud saving them the time and headache of transferring their work to a desktop.

Learn more about the benefits of cloud print management.

1. IDG research, "2018 Cloud Computing Survey." IDG Communications, Inc., August 14, 2018. https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1624046/2018%20Cloud%20Computing%20Executive%20Summary.pdf