Here we are, the end of our series on cloud print management basics… I won’t cry, I won’t cry… *sniffles*
What a ride it’s been! At the very start of this series, we spoke about all the cloud concerns that one might find racing through their minds while looking up into the sky…
And what do you know, we’ve covered them all!
- Why businesses are moving to cloud print management
- Public vs private vs hybrid cloud
- Single and multitenant applications
What’s up our sleeve to finish off?
Well, as you may have noticed, we’ve also been mentioning our own cloud products from time to time during these blogs. To cap off with 105, we thought we’d tell you how PaperCut has evolved into the cloud print management picture.
Private, hybrid hosted & single tenant = PaperCut MF
At a glance
- Modular
- Secure
- Scalable
- Hybrid & private hosted cloud compatible
- Built using Web Services
- Mobility Print and Print Deploy work in the cloud
- Google Cloud Directory and Azure AD user sync built-in
- Deploy on Azure, Amazon AWS, Google GCP
The nitty gritty
From the very beginning, PaperCut MF was built as a web service with remote browser administration. This made it a great fit for cloud-based print management from the get-go and still makes it a great fit for private cloud.
Most legacy printing applications are still playing catch up by converting old style, thick UI client interfaces into Web Browser-based applications. Meanwhile, in its very nature PaperCut MF is modular. There are several flexible methods to architect it for private and hybrid cloud-hosted print management.
Part of that flexibility is calibrating PaperCut MF for your desired cloud advantages. You can customize print jobs to stay local on your network. You can even design your set-up for high availability and redundancy.
Security is the biggest advantage of private and hybrid cloud environments. PaperCut MF caters to this as well. The advantage is you can deploy it in your secured cloud environment of choice and you have full control over everything from encryption certificates, authentication policies, and where your data is located.
Another part of the demand for cloud is meeting the rise of the mobile worker, and PaperCut MF is feature-rich to cater to easy BYOD printing with Mobility Print and Print Deploy - all easily accessible via a web browser.
What if you’re already leveraging cloud directory services like GSuite or AzureAD? PaperCut MF has built-in integrations with them for User/Group synchronization.
Or maybe you want to leverage scan to OneDrive or GSuite or Dropbox? This is all covered with the hybrid cloud approach.
What about computationally intensive OCR (image to text)? Again, with PaperCut MF’s hybrid cloud approach, you can enable this with a PaperCut MF checkbox.
Even though PaperCut can be deployed without any interoperability with the cloud, a combination of private and hybrid cloud does unlock a lot of magic for everything from education to SMB and large enterprise.
Public, SaaS & Multitenant = PaperCut Pocket/PaperCut Hive
At a glance
- Cloud-native hosted SaaS print management
- Multitenant - serverless application
- Edge Mesh - innovative print management approach
- Self-healing - no single point of failure
- Print jobs can stay local
- Zero-trust network - highly secure job encryption
- Continuous deployment auto-updating with the latest features
The nitty gritty
PaperCut Pocket and PaperCut Hive are built off our cloud-native platform which borrows the best parts of IoT. One of the core concepts at the forefront of IoT design is security. We’ve brought that strongly into a cloud-native platform as a design principle right from the first line of code.
As multitenant public SaaS solutions PaperCut Pocket and PaperCut Hive are also designed with scalability and efficiency at the forefront of development. The platform is designed with a microservices architecture and modern continuous deployment development practices that many of you will be aware of today as you’ll be using products like Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite.
The benefits of this are new features become available quickly without needing to perform upgrades and the cost savings at hosting at scale are passed through to organizations.
PaperCut Pocket is for small businesses looking at a DIY solution for cloud print management. PaperCut Hive is for enterprise organizations looking for cloud-native embedded MFD/MFP software.
Bring the best from the IoT: Edge Mesh
There are lots of cool things about our new cloud-native products. One of them is the way it was influenced by the world of IoT (Internet of Things) - a space that also had to overcome the difficulties of marrying hardware and the internet.
We looked at the best practices of the IoT world and adapted them for the world of cloud-managed print management. Specifically, the concepts of Edge computing and self-healing Mesh.
The magic is mixing the two together to bring the benefits of on-prem and cloud melded as one. This creates an ‘and-and’ environment rather than an ‘and-or’ tradeoff. At a basic level, PaperCut Edge Mesh means all your print traffic stays on your local on-premise network where technically possible. No going up to the cloud and back again.
PaperCut Edge Mesh means your printing is secure, reliable, and offers a speedy and simple user experience. Thanks to the beauty of the cloud SaaS model, features and updates for security are automatically deployed. You’ll have the most current, highest-functioning version of the software at all times.
Every cloud is a different shape
Just like each operating system is a different shape, and each printer model and make is different, clouds come in different forms too. We’ve been saying it this whole series (Bingo!) It’s an important part of our approach to print management: customer first. We work hard to ensure our customers have a choice: choice of O/S, choice of printer brand, and of course, the choice of cloud type.
PaperCut MF offers a solution for organizations seeking control of their print management. It’s a true single-tenant hybrid cloud solution. You choose where it’s hosted and which hybrid cloud features you enable (e.g. Scan to Cloud ? OCR ?) PaperCut MF is a solid solution for private hosted print management. Hosted PaperCut MF is a great complement to managed print services offerings as well and is a service provided by many of our partners.
PaperCut Pocket and PaperCut Hive off our cloud-native platform are unique and robust SaaS print management solutions that will change the way you think about print management in the cloud. Borrowing the best of IoT including Edge Mesh technology, our cloud-native solutions auto-update and can have the cloud benefit of reduced cost of operations.
The 4 pillars of our cloud print management solutions
It doesn’t matter which cloud solution you go for. From single tenant private and hybrid hosted PaperCut MF to multitenant SaaS public PaperCut Pocket and PaperCut Hive, our approach to cloud print management is driven by four guiding principles:
Security - Protecting sensitive information is present in everything we do from the first line of code through to ongoing service and support.
Simplicity - Yes, it is actually possible to solve some amazing technical problems without compromising on a joyful print experience.
Flexibility - We are customer first and aim to offer you choice: any printer, any hosting environment, any platform, any O/S, any device.
Performance - Our flagship print management solution is brewed with 20+ years of industry experience and is a fully powered private and hybrid cloud solution. PaperCut Edge Mesh (available in products off our cloud-native platform) print jobs never get sent via the cloud so printing speed matches existing on-prem performance.
Until next time…
*blows nose* There I go, whimpering again. We’re at the end of our cloud print management basics series. This time, there is no next time… Until I return in our next series to talk about more of the cool stuff in our new cloud-native platform !
