5 Reasons Data Center Transformation is Good for Printing

Data centers are also changing

Our data centers and with them, our applications and services are undergoing rapid transformation – the days of the company data center are numbered. Gone are the times when organizations strove to run their own, in-house data center. While they won’t be completely eliminated, their role will significantly decrease in favor of other private cloud approaches that utilize servers run in a third party data center.
Today and for the foreseeable future, we will utilize a number of different cloud flavors, many of them designed to replicate the privacy and control of the in-house data center but with much lower cost and far greater flexibility.

There are still many reasons to run your own applications and services but the infrastructure they need can be far better provided by using services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or an independent, trusted, experienced Managed Service Provider providing a secure, stable private cloud environment. This allows organizations to run a tightly controlled and secured environment at lower costs as they benefit from the economies of scale of their data center provider and don’t have to spend time and money managing hardware.

What does all this have to do with printing?

There are a number of reasons to treat printing like a private cloud service that is centrally run and managed, with users connecting as needed. As we’re transforming our data centers, we have a perfect opportunity to implement and benefit from these changes. In a series of blog entries, I’m outlining the 5 most important reasons to make them.

In the first part of this series, I want to focus on:

IT (and printing as part of that) is a service, services are not run on user’s devices.

Over the past several years, we’ve centralized applications, data repositories, management of all kinds of devices and more and generated unprecedented savings using server virtualization, all while delivering IT to our users as a secure, reliable and convenient service.
Those who have implemented remote or virtual desktops with thin clients have taken this concept the furthest but there are plenty of exciting use cases without going to the extreme.

Printing should be no exception. Overall, print volume may decline as we’ve stopped printing an email just to read it, yet printing remains critical to most business operations. Certain content may even make printing highly confidential or deeply personal. But there is never an application so specialized and demanding that it should have to be set up, processed, maintained, updated and troubleshot on each and every physical and virtual desktop / workstation in your environment.

Users expect to come to work and have printing available just as they expect their applications to be available. The easiest way to do that is to connect users to a reliable, secure and efficient private cloud enterprise print service.
With ThinPrint, users’ printers are either assigned automatically or are easy to find, there’s one easy-to-use interface that presents the available features for each printer. There are no drivers to manage on any desktop or workstation, and no sacrificing of printer features. Print system errors or outages become a thing of the past which allows users to spend time far more productively and not on helpdesk calls. In all, it’s a simple, reliable, efficient private cloud service.

For IT, things become far simpler, more reliable and highly efficient. Drivers are managed centrally within the private cloud, for just one OS, help desk calls are reduced by up to 80%, print data volume that needs to be managed on the network by up to 98%. Even far-away branch and remote locations can easily be integrated into the central infrastructure, even without the use of a VPN. Printer assignments and many other routine tasks can be dynamically automated and high availability features ensure that a private-cloud enterprise print service is always simply, reliably and efficiently available.
The next part of the series will be about Fewer drivers are better on desktops.

A more channel-related article that I authored on the future of printing in 2017 can be found at the Imagingchannel.