Publish date: 13.03.23

During the last few years, the role of IT leaders has significantly evolved alongside the evolution of technology.

Where previously you might have typically been in charge of the maintenance and upkeep of systems, responding to customer needs, and overseeing troubleshooting tasks, today you might be tackling mission-critical projects to help increase business efficiency through automation tools and optimising internal processes.

But what is the link between IT efficiency and something like print? You might even wonder if print is going to be around in the coming years. With cloud-based print management, IT leaders can maximise IT efficiency. The cloud lets IT teams retire their print management workload thanks to a simplified print infrastructure, automation, and remote systems access.

The Need for Greater IT Efficiencies Never Stops

Keeping up with technological development and digital transformation can be unsettling for the people whose jobs the tech is designed to make easier. The reality is that some fear they’ll get replaced by technology, and others fear that they’ll get in too deep with a solution that’ll end up causing more problems than it fixes. But within IT departments, progress is non-negotiable if you want to maximise efficiency and get ahead.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, you need to continually adjust your strategies to stay ahead of the curve and understand what solutions and technologies are best suited for the needs of your organisation.

To keep up with business demands and on-mission critical tasks, your best bet is efficiency-promoting technology… like cloud-based printing. Essentially, with cloud-based platforms, you can optimise your IT team’s efficiency with a simplified print driver concept.

Print Drivers are an IT Headache

Print drivers are a massive source of pain for IT teams because of their complexity. They require constant monitoring, updating, and troubleshooting to ensure that printing stays operational and secure. This gets time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to manage for IT teams already dealing with a multitude of other IT projects and support requests at any given time. On top of that, because many organisations utilise more than one brand of device, it can be difficult for IT teams to stay on top of driver updates to ensure compatibility with their systems.

Even if you try to work with a single print manufacturer, you can meet challenges associated with different print device generations, finishing options, print languages, supported operating systems, and varying versions of the driver, or small desktop printers that are often purchased outside of an MPS contract.

Fundamentally, print drivers were designed to be a piece of software on a computer that converts data to be printed into a format that a printer can understand.  Over time, as layers of complexity have been built into them, managing print drivers has become a task in itself.  IT teams have been forced to develop processes to handle print driver updates, using print servers as a distribution platform. But now, its time to change that.

Cloud-based Print Management to the Rescue

With cloud print management, the headache goes away. You gain a simplified print infrastructure with smart print devices, a web-based UI, and efficiency-promoting features, like finishing options, global updates and patching, and remote access.

IT simply installs a client containing a universal print driver that includes full finishing options for all major manufacturers on users’ devices. Any updates in policy or device commands are pulled down to the client on a regular basis so that users are always up to date and can print to all available devices, irrespective of manufacturer. Let’s call this the ‘Modern Print Driver.’

With a modern print driver (like YSoft EveryonePrint), it becomes possible to manage multiple print devices via a full-featured single driver – resulting in less time strain for IT, less hassle for end-users, and a better print experience for all.

In the following section, we’ll show you how cloud printing services help sustain IT efficiency, and just how important a role the Modern Print Driver plays.

The 9 Ways Cloud-based Print Management Can Super-charge IT Efficiency
  1. A Modern Print Driver for the Modern Workplace

The Modern Print Driver, unlike standard universal print drivers (UPDs), is designed to work across all printer models and brands. A universal print driver is one single manufacturer driver that enables consistent print performance on that manufacturer’s devices. The Modern Print Driver steps it up a notch.

Even with a UPD, since they come up short in a multi-vendor print environment, many IT teams will end up still having to administer and maintain a repository of multiple print drivers to manage their printer fleet, taking away time from their mission-critical tasks. Opting for a cloud solution with a fully-featured single driver (the Modern Print Driver), you and your team will never have to worry about printer drivers again.

How does the Modern Print Driver function? Once a user authenticates at any of your fleet’s devices, YSoft Everyoneprint seamlessly formats the job, including all finishing options, and quickly sends it to a chosen printer (regardless of brand), helping users to leverage the best of their print devices.

With a true cloud platform, the print driver can move from being a point of frustration to a business enabler.

  1. Centralised Administration

By utilising a cloud-based print management solution, you can enable your organisation to access IT resources and services on-demand. A native cloud print setup makes it easy to manage your print infrastructure from a simple web-based UI, remotely accessible, without requiring your IT team to be onsite, so they can spend time elsewhere on higher-value work.

  1. IT Automation

Since the Covid-19 Pandemic, more IT teams are turning to automation to unburden staff from time-consuming tasks and to reduce costs. This has resulted in accelerated cloud adoption as organisations have navigated the Pandemic’s impact. According to Quocirca, by 2025, 61% of businesses expect to be fully or mostly using the cloud for their IT infrastructure, up from 27% in 2022.

With YSoft EveryonePrint, we can help you to automate driver provisioning for endpoint print devices, OS updates and print queue creation etc across all sites.

  1. Increased Accessibility

With YSoft EveryonePrint, users can access devices and print from any location, as long as they have an internet connection. These systems feature a serverless PC and Mac client with the ability to store print jobs locally until released for print. Once a user authenticates at any of your fleet’s devices, the platform will seamlessly format the job including all finishing options, and quickly send it to be printed.

The platform enables self-service for users to add or search for devices available to them. It’s also possible to set up location-aware printers, giving users who work across different branches, offices, or departments seamless and secure access to a print device across any network or location.

  1. Better Security Management

From an IT security perspective, it’s important to consider security when targeting system and process improvements. The cloud-native single driver helps organisations of all sizes reduce risks associated with attacks and security breaches by providing secure access to print devices and the data associated with them.

The full-featured single driver automatically stays up to date, reducing testing and approval workload to ensure easy deployment and compliance with the highest security standards.

Monthly releases ensure your cloud print solution is always up to date with current security standards (like GDPR, OWASP, CCM, and more), ensuring ongoing protection across confidentiality, integrity, and availability for your systems and data.

  1. Streamlined costs, and greater savings

Having to troubleshoot print driver conflicts and manage updates inevitably takes time and burns a hole in the IT budget. With a full-featured single driver like the one you’ll find in YSoft EveryonePrint, all updates made automatically. This makes it easy to add or remove devices without having to install another driver.

  1. Remote Management

With cloud-based print management systems functioning off a single full-featured driver, your team will be able to access and manage your print infrastructure from any remote location. That means they can manage workstations, servers, or endpoints from anywhere. This has the power to cut down on the number of site visits the team need to make in a given period, saving on travel time and costs.

  1. Hassle-free Scalability

True cloud platforms like YSoft EveryonePrint are scalable by design. One key aspect of IT efficiency is how well your integrated systems and processes handle business growth. With a cloud print infrastructure, your team can accelerate the business’s digital transformation and cloud journey—at your pace, your way, without running into issues with your print environment.

  1. Decreased Non-essential Helpdesk Calls

With automation, a simplified infrastructure, and stable connectivity, solutions like YSoft EveryonePrint offers simplification of common IT helpdesk pain points such as connecting users to a printer, whether they are onboarded, at their home location or when visiting another site.

A Modern Print Driver lets organisations easily enable end-users in a self-service model to be able to print securely to any device (supporting all major print manufacturers), from either desktop or mobile, with full complex print driver commands (duplex, staple, holepunch etc.), without having to call on IT for help.

In other words, this solution is made to account for all common, non-essential helpdesk requests, empowering your colleagues to confidently leverage the infrastructure from the get-go, free from having to reach out for support on a weekly basis. Ultimately, that results in less risk for your IT team to be pulled away from core business projects.

Interested? Speak to us today about how we can help you to implement cloud-based print management

We can help you manage your fleet, providing you with customisation options, fleet-wide change capabilities and security management to keep your fleet up to date and your users more productive and protected without any disruption.

Contact us here