Over the past two decades, a major technology conglomerate had grown to be one of the leading providers of social media products and services in the world. With more than 75,000 employees and offices on six continents, the company had established a massive IT landscape. Due to the dynamic nature of their industry and the need to provide continual service to billions of customers around the world, they had created a large, fault-tolerant computing environment with multiple levels of redundancy for all critical IT systems.

Along with their highly scalable IT environment, the social media giant’s flexible approach to staffing allowed them to continually adjust their workforce to meet their business needs. Many workers were hired on a temporary contract basis, which presented challenges from an IT security perspective. Employees who had access to sensitive customer data one day may not be authorized to see that same information the next. This included printed documents, which contain some of the most sensitive information of all.

To ensure data security, the company issued a new ID badge for employees every day, which included access credentials for all applications, facilities, and IT assets including print devices and queues. Network rights were granted at the moment each ID card was issued.

Like most organizations, the company was forced to quickly adjust their work processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. With many employees working from home, the company’s IT department embarked on a project to dramatically improve their internal systems. Enhancing the security and flexibility of their print infrastructure was a high priority.

Members of the company’s global IT team issued an RFP with a challenging list of secure print requirements. The solution must be highly scalable and fault-tolerant as well as provide high performance across a global network. Users should only be able to retrieve print jobs after swiping a secure proximity badge, which would be issued anew each and every day. Due to the sensitive nature of many documents, the contents must remain in encrypted form at all points between the originating application and the output tray of the end printer or multifunction device.

After evaluating all RFP responses, the team found that only the MFPsecure®/Print solution from LRS met all of the company’s requirements. LRS staff were granted special permission to come on site during the pandemic and install the software in a pilot environment. Once configured, the LRS team worked to fully integrate the software to work with the company’s IT automation/DevOps environment. This would enable their internal systems to spin up as many instances of the LRS® software - in fully configured form - as were needed to meet the company’s everchanging print management needs.

The customer contracted an LRS technical expert to work full time on this critical project to ensure the new print environment was fully tested and ready once the company’s workforce returned to the office. The result of this work was a highly flexible and secure pull printing solution that requires minimal administrator intervention.

Today, the LRS software enables workers from any office to print to a secure personal print queue and retrieve documents by tapping an ID badge at any MFP on the company’s global network. The intuitive Personal Print Manager client lets employees handle basic print management tasks without involving IT admin staff.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• Robust encryption of document data both at rest and while it is in motion across the corporate network. Provides maximum protection for sensitive document-based information to safeguard customer data and valuable intellectual property.
• Automated provisioning of fully configured MFPsecure/Print instances when needed. Custom integration with the customer’s existing IT automation/DevOps environment ensures that new server instances are available on demand for maximum reliability.
• Seamless, universal document access for employees; users simply tap their access badge on the MFP to initiate printing of all documents in their personal queue.
• Simplified IT operations: the new solution simplifies management of the print environment and components as compared to the previous complex infrastructure.

KEY DELIVERABLES

• Secure pull printing environment that safeguards document contents until an authorized end user successfully authenticates at the output device.
• Intuitive user interface that enables employees to perform basic print management tasks without involving IT staff.
• Scalable print management environment that can handle dramatically increased document volumes without the need for additional servers or specialty hardware.
• A vendor neutral printing solution that supports devices from any hardware manufacturer.

Learn how LRS® solutions can improve document security in your environment. Visit LRSOutputManagement.com to learn more.