In a company or any business an IT work is important. Hiring a security consultant is needed to make sure all your systems are on the standard security measures. This includes encryption, access controls, and a firewall. But left behind is also your printer who needs to be fixed professionally and securely. You need another consultant to fix your printers in the office. The consultant may find fixing your printer by shutting off your office’s firewall. This hurts you on the condition that your high-tech and digitized life still is in little pieces.
Now, find out the things you must know about your printer security. Here’s a review of the possible situations that you might encounter about securing the work of your printer.
Other printers have no restriction on who can print to them. How big is it if anyone can send things to your printer? It may be surprising, but it can pose a serious threat aside from being offensive, waste of paper and ink. They can connect to wireless networks and store data on hard drives. It is expected that their security vulnerabilities can be more complicated.
There’s also a concern if other people can access the documents that you’re printing. Make sure if you are printing something sensitive, encryption on the wireless network is in place. Similar risks also apply to the scanning and copying functions which can save digital copies of the documents they process. This is common to multifunction printers that can fax and scan besides printing, in fact, the security of it is the primary focus.
There are worse things than printers refusing to print, and hackers may somehow share your file to every publicly accessible printer. Many printers now are taking steps to restrict their printers to some users as are precautions to encrypt network traffic.
Even if after you’ve successfully printed something you can still end up in uncomfortable situations such as someone stumbles across the documents you have printed before you pick it up. With this kind of situation, you can have someone in charge to explicitly “release” each printing job at the printer itself. This will help you to reduce the chances of others seeing/glancing or picking the document you have printed. Another slant you can do is to print a blank “cover page” at the beginning of each new printing with your name labeled so that other people less likely to accidentally glimpse any content of it.
We perhaps need to be liable how public our printers often are, there are circumstances that the document you have printed contains your strategic planning among others only to find out the information was spread out. There’s this saying whenever you use your computer, “think before you click” it also applies when using your printer, “think before you print.”