Hosting PaperCut MF in cloud environments
PaperCut MF is well-known for being a fantastic on-prem print management solution, however PaperCut MF is also able to operate in a cloud environment. PaperCut MF is suitable for private cloud environments and has been operating in a number of our customers’ networks in this hybrid configuration for many years now.
Let’s explore the business impacts and benefits of hosting your print management in Private Cloud host versus Public Cloud.
What’s the difference between private and public cloud print management?
Private Cloud
When cloud print management software is exclusively managed, maintained, and used by one organization, it is considered private. The benefits to hosting your software in a private cloud is you have full ownership, control and oversight of your environment. It helps reduce management overhead as you are now only needing to effectively manage the software environment, with all hardware management maintained by the private cloud vendor. Often, if using a service such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, there is also built in redundancy with these environments to protect against a data center failure. There is also a simple backup management strategy available, offering both cloud based backups and on prem backup transfers.
Hosting in private cloud does have a few costs associated, which typically include the space you’re using on the platform, the virtual machines, operating systems, data transfer, and processing power. But the flexibility of this solution means that you can scale up and down your services as required, simply and easily. No longer do you have to plan for a bigger server in case you need more resources in the future, just expand your running servers with a click of a button.
Private cloud is also referred to as Self-hosted (single-tenant) cloud and the resources and access to these services are maintained separately from other customers hosting with the provider.
Public Cloud
Cloud-based computing infrastructure that is owned and operated by a vendor, and accessed over the internet, is referred to as public cloud hosted. Hosting in public cloud is ideal for customers who have limited IT resources, budget or just needs an Enterprise ready solution to conduct business.
Hosting in public cloud also involves some costs, which often include application hosting fees, customer support and management costs, resource scaling, data communication expenses, software licencing fees, and subscription costs.
Examples of software offered through a public cloud include Xero, Adobe Creative Cloud, Office 365. This is also known as multi-tenancy software; multiple customers access the same software but is restricted to their own accounts.
PaperCut has established partnerships with resellers, OEMs and ASCs around the globe, which makes your hosting options nearly endless. These partners can help set up your environment or, in some cases, may offer hosting services on your behalf. Some partners can even remotely manage your print services.
PaperCut offers a multi-tenancy cloud print management solution with our PaperCut Pocket solution.
PaperCut MF in the cloud
We traditionally see customers running their print management solution on-prem. But over the recent years there has been a big push to move away from on-prem servers and migrate services to the cloud.
One of the benefits with PaperCut MF is the flexibility and adaptability of the software to be able to fit into a variety of different architecture designs. We have seen customers start with a fully on-prem solution, then conduct step change migration plans to have hybrid or full cloud implementations.
This process often starts with the migration of the application server into a private cloud/self-hosted (single-tenant) environment. During this phase, a secure VPN is established to link the cloud environment with the on-prem users/services. Organizations often continue running their print servers on-prem to ensure jobs are kept local to their physical site. This hybrid approach is generally accepted as the first steps towards a fully cloud delivered solution.
Some organizations have a strong desire to move all services to a cloud-based solution. This process begins with phasing out their on-prem servers and migrating services to the cloud environment they’ve established.
At this point the company needs to consider things like bandwidth throughput, upload and download costs, print load capacity, redundancy of internet links, etc. We also offer the option for serverless printing with direct-print, where users can send jobs straight to the printer, but all management is still recorded in the cloud.
Pair this ability with some of the additional features in PaperCut MF, such as Print Deploy, and you now have a flexible solution that will allow users to move easily between different sites within the company, but still print simply and effectively with print queues deployed automatically.
Cloud hosting scenarios
Below are some popular cloud hosting scenarios which you may consider for your environment.
All in cloud (PaperCut MF App Server and print server)
PaperCut App Server in cloud and print server/site server on premise
PaperCut App Server in cloud and direct print monitor on your local machine
Please contact PaperCut or your local Authorised PaperCut partner to get more details on more PaperCut MF hosting scenarios