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Managed print services are available from a variety of providers, so how do you choose the best one for your business? There are a few questions that you can ask a potential provider to get the information you really need to make the best choice. The Proactive Touch Some managed print providers are reactionary – they respond after there is a problem with the equipment or the machines have run out of ink, paper, or toner. What you need is one that is proactive instead. This means that they will take the initiative to provide maintenance service to the machines to keep them in good repair. They will also monitor the machines and order new ink and other supplies when they will soon be needed. This is a great way to avoid having any downtime with your printer fleet. Custom Pricing No company has exactly the same printer fleet as any other. That’s why the service you get, and the pricing, should be customized to your business. A flat-rate for everyone could mean you’re paying for machines that you don’t even have. A customized quote takes into account exactly the number of printers you have and how much you will need in supplies. Your provider should be able to build a custom price quote that would be the best price for your company. Replacing the Fleet When a printer gets regular maintenance, it can last for many years. However, there is an eventual end to the life of all printers. If you have one or more printers in your fleet that are beyond repair, will the managed print service replace them? Can they service machines that could be used longer? If a managed print provider is able to both make repairs and replace printers that go out, it will save everyone in your company a lot of hassle.

It would be challenging to dispute just how useful the cloud is for storage and backing up files. However, using cloud services for a backup and using it as file storage or two different things. Here’s what you need to know about what each of these office services is and which one of them you may need for your company’s files. Cloud Storage You may have heard a lot about cloud storage and how helpful it can be to companies of every size. This type of storage is used by taking the files that are needed and transferring them via the Internet to a third-party who will store them. This can be very helpful for storing large amounts of data that would otherwise hamper your computer system with all the storage needed. With this office service, your company will not have to worry about storage space or get rid of older files to create and keep new ones. Cloud Backup A company network full of important data can benefit from being backed up with the clown. This process sends copies of the information in your computer network to an offsite server. This offsite backup keeps the information held off-site up-to-date and ready in case there is some disaster in around your company. Choosing Cloud Services You may already know your company needs to use the cloud to keep its important files safe. However, choosing between these two cloud solutions depends on precisely what your office needs from its file storage. If the problem is only not having enough storage space, cloud storage can make a world of difference. If you are concerned about natural disasters taking out your computer network, a cloud backup may be the best choice for your business.

Managed print services may seem like something that would only benefit huge companies, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The use of these services can help companies of virtually every size in many ways, saving them money and helping them to be more efficient. Assessing Your Machines The fleet of printers in the office, even if it’s only a few, can be dragged down if the efficiency of one isn’t working well. The initial assessment of the printers in the office will inform you about any printers that should be replaced. If a printer is older, it will almost certainly be slower. If a printer has had a lot of problems and needs repairs regularly, it may be more cost-effective to replace it with a newer model. This assessment saves the company money in the long run by ensuring that all machines are in good repair and are fast enough to keep productivity high. Monitoring Printing Behaviors Part of the monitoring of the printers is a tally of who is using the printers and how much they use them. Each employee is given their code so that this data is easy to track and assess. If your company is very small, it may be challenging to confront a worker about the overuse of the printer because harmony in the office is always sought. However, with an assessment that shows you the hard data, it’s far easier to show the numbers to an employee and let them know that the printers are being used too often. Keeping the Printers Running One way that managed print services save you money is by maintaining the printers through regular monitoring and scheduled maintenance. This allows for any problems with the machines to be found early before they become large and expensive to fix. Regular maintenance can allow the printers to run faster and to stay in your printer fleet longer. This saves the company money on repairs and replacements, and it keeps office efficiency higher.

Cloud computing is the future, and it has arrived in force. Numerous benefits come from storing data on the cloud, ranging from data backups to ease of distribution. On the other hand, it is also essential for companies to make sure their data is protected. There are a few simple steps that every company can take to protect themselves and their data from being stolen from the crowd. Authentication Controls One of the most important security tools comes in the form of authentication controls. Businesses need to make sure they use single sign-on methods to facilitate account management. This can also go a long way toward improving the experience of the user. This needs to be supplemented with additional multifactor authentication metrics that can prevent someone from reusing credentials that might have been stolen. Endpoint Protection Next, it is also important to deploy endpoint protection. This is a next-generation security technology that is a must for any company that runs full operating systems through the cloud. Endpoint protection can prevent someone from easily stealing data from the cloud and compromising a business. Do not overlook this vital metric. Monitor the Cloud Closely Countless technological tools can reach directly into public cloud environments. These tools play an important role in monitoring the security of web infrastructure. Some of the most important regulations that guide this technology include HIPAA, ISO 27001, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and other key rules. Remain compliant and protect company data at the same time. Segment Cloud Networks When servers are deployed to the cloud, they need to follow the same segmentation standards as deployments that take place on-site. Segmenting internet-facing systems can help a company reduce its risk, making it harder for criminals and hackers to find sensitive information.

You have a lot of choices when it comes to office services. For example, you could focus on boosting security, organizing your files, or improving communication. While these are all great options, there’s one solution that combines them all: mobile printing. Here are just a few things mobile printing can do for you! Efficiency On the Go For many businesses, the ideas of “efficiency” and “productivity” are mostly anchored to the office. After all, it’s not like you can pack up your printer and take it with you on the road, or pack all of the file cabinets into the back of your company car right? Well, the truth is, that’s where mobile printing comes in. As part of a comprehensive managed print approach to your workflow, mobile printing can be a simple office service that makes some significant changes. At its heart, mobile printing is a solution that allows you to take efficiency, productivity, reliability, and security on the go, which means that you can do business wherever your path takes you. Here are a few things mobile printing can do for you! #1: Improve flexibility Need to meet a client at a coffee shop? Interested in letting some of your employees work from home? Want to take your business on the road? Mobile printing allows you to do all these things and more without sacrificing your ability to access and print your documents. #2: Utilize tools more efficiently One of the best things about mobile printing is that it allows you to take advantage of the tools you already have for example, your smartphones and tablets. You can access mobile print apps from all your devices! #3: Manage data Mobile printing doesn’t just let you print. It helps you capture data, too which means your employees and teams can communicate smoothly and efficiently no matter where they are.

One of the first things you hear in discussions about printer security is to keep an eye on the hard drive. How can you do that if you don’t even know whether your machine has a hard drive at all? Today we’ll show you how to find out–and what to do with this information. Hard Drives and Print Security Protecting your office equipment can often feel like a full-time job. After all, you have to make sure your printers, copiers, computers, and mobile devices are safe both online and offline. Since there are so many ways to do that, the whole thing can start to feel overwhelming. Luckily, there’s an easy place to start: finding out if your printer or copier has a hard drive. Where to Look You’ll want to locate your device’s datasheet. Sometimes known as a spec sheet or brochure, this document comes straight from the manufacturer and includes everything you need to know about your printer or copier. You should be able to find the datasheet by starting an Internet search with the manufacturer name and machine identification. Hard Drives vs. Memory Remember, there’s a difference between memory and the hard drive. Random-access memory, or RAM, is (in simple terms) short-term storage, and is cleared of data every so often. Hard drives, on the other hand, store data more permanently. Why It Matters If your printer or copier has a hard drive, that means it’s storing your personal information. This isn’t a bad thing until you go to get rid of the machine. At that point, it’s essential to know how to wipe or destroy the hard drive so that your data never falls into the wrong hands.

When you have an office equipment maintenance agreement, it’s easy to see how well it works, especially when you have plenty of machines in the office that will all need regular maintenance. However, it may be tempting to not renew your agreement after it runs out simply to save money. However, this is likely to cause more trouble than it’s worth. Fix Your Costs If you don’t know which machines will need maintenance, and you can’t predict which type, there’s no way to know how much you need for maintenance or repairs in any given month. When you renew your office equipment maintenance agreement, you know exactly how much your maintenance costs will be for this month and every month. These fixed costs allow for better budging, and it leaves no risk of large, unexpected equipment costs. Keeping Machines Running Your office equipment is vital to the office, and it represents a large investment by the company. To protect the money that has been invested in these machines, a maintenance agreement will keep them running by providing regular maintenance to them. These maintenance sessions serve to keep the machines running well, and they can prevent larger problems from developing. This keeps costs low while keeping the machines in good condition for longer. This means not needing to replace the machines as often and significant savings for the company. Extra Services When you have a maintenance agreement for your office equipment, you have support personnel ready to extend help whenever it is needed. This includes being on call to take care of problems with the equipment. It also means having the same couple of technicians servicing your equipment. This allows you to have a good working relationship with your technicians as they learn about your machines and what they need over time. As you get to know your technicians, you can ask them questions and get advice about your machines. Your technicians are professionals who understand the exact models of office equipment in your office, so your equipment will get the right attention at the right time.

The average law firm has an enormous amount of information that must be kept accessible on office equipment and ready to be used when it’s needed. However, it is far harder to find specific information when it is in files like PDFs. These files can be transferred to different file types with the help of optical character recognition. Making Documents Searchable In any law firm, finding specific data is of the utmost importance. However, when documents are in PDF format, they can’t be searched for any words or phrases. Instead, the entire file is an image, and the computer can’t read the actual text on the page. To make these documents into ones that can be searchable, there is optical character recognition software. This software has a different way of scanning a PDF. Instead of seeing it as an image, it sees the specific characters and spaces on the document. It recreates all of the text into a different file format that can be read as text by the computer. This makes it fully searchable. Effective Translation When optical character recognition is used on documents, it is programmed to understand how words and sentences are constructed. It has its own dictionary of words, so it may even correct typos from the original document. Using optical character recognition is a great way to make sure that what is created is free from errors. It is more accurate than most human translation, so you can get a document that is correct and not hampered by any human error. No legal form should have errors in it. The precise language used needs to be preserved for clarity and correctness. Organizing Data In the course of legal work, information may be admitted in many different forms. It’s common to get a PDF of a document, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. With optical character recognition, you can get the text-based documents that you need no matter how they were originally sent to you. It takes little time to have the image document translated and placed into a searchable, editable document.

The use of managed print services is growing as the many benefits of this arrangement become clear. There are so many ways that managed print can save a business both time and money that it’s a fast-growing service for businesses of every type. If you’re considering managed print services, here are just a few ways that this service can help your business. Letting IT Do IT It’s become too common to have a company’s IT workers put in charge of taking care of the printers. However, this means they can spend less of their time on actual IT work. In addition, many IT workers aren’t well versed in printer maintenance. Each model of printer has its own maintenance needs and features to keep running, and your IT workers should not have to learn all of the ins and outs of that machine. When IT workers have less time for IT duties, your entire computer network could suffer. Getting managed print services puts printer maintenance, repairs and stocking supplies to printer techs who are highly knowledgeable about your printer type. Then, your IT department can keep your network safe. Keeping Your Printers Private Your laser printers are a part of your overall computer network. They may not be computers, but they receive streams of data to print, and that data can be hacked. Managed print services monitor your laser printers as well as making sure that all updates are installed and every security measure is taken to keep that data safe. Without professional care for your printer fleet and the quick updates of the system, hackers can take advantage of any software flaws to hack in and steal data. Cutting Printing Costs If you don’t have managed print, you may have high printing costs that you’ve been trying to figure out. Why is it costing so much? When there is no one to monitor the usage of the printer, employees will print as much as they like, whether or not they really need to do so. They may also print everything in color simply because they can. Once the printer is monitored for employee usage, however, printer users think twice about whether those pages really have to be printed and whether black-and-white is fine for the document. With less printing going on, you will pay less or ink, paper and electricity usage for the machine.

With so many services offered to modern businesses, it’s easy to get confused or assume that services are the same. This is often the case with cloud-based services, as the differences between them can be subtle. Understanding the difference between cloud backup and storage is vital before you sign up for either or both services. What is Cloud Backup? The idea behind cloud backup is a simple one. As your team works, a backup of the data created is sent to an offsite location. This can be done once a day or several times a day for larger enterprises. Backup helps to preserve the valuable data that your business creates from day to day. This might include records of client transactions, inventory records or documents created to make workflows easier. In the case of a power outage, natural disaster or malicious attack on your system, you can use the backup data to minimize the impact on your day to day operations instead of having to recreate everything from scratch. For example, cybercriminals may use ransomware attacks to hold your business data hostage and demand you pay them to restore your operations. Instead of paying the ransom, you can use cloud backup to restore your operations. What is Cloud Storage? Cloud storage is an essential service for businesses who want to make operations mobile, keep documents secure and allow employees to work remotely. With cloud storage, important documents and data are stored offsite, removing the expense of upkeeping a physical server in the office space. All kinds of files needed to do business can be stored this way, including important documents, photos, and multimedia resources. By moving to cloud storage, businesses also make it harder for hackers to gain access to the data, as the cloud adds an extra layer of protection. You can also expand the amount of storage you have at a moment’s notice, making it ideal for businesses that are growing quickly and expanding rapidly.