Tavs Dalaa, CTO
9 min read
When Managed Print Service software was first introduced, print management services were commonly offered alongside traditional hardware and office equipment. Businesses considered software a differentiator more than an opportunity to improve and simplify IT departments' processes and workflows. Like print, for instance.
Print providers, IT resellers, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer Managed Print Services (MPS) to manage print systems and devices. Users typically run the software through a cloud setup.
Managed print software helps businesses optimize their printer fleet through print environment assessment, provider-managed deployments, and proactive device administration. To embrace cloud-based managed print software, start by ensuring infrastructure readiness.
In this article, we’ll dive into our top 15 tips to become cloud-ready and what you need to include in your cloud readiness assessment.
What is Cloud Print & Managed Print Services Software?
External providers offer Managed print services (like cloud solutions) to optimize or manage a company's document output processes.
📖 Read on → What is a Cloud Print Service: Cloud-First Print Approach
Solution providers manage these managed print services software solutions, so you get a sophisticated print architecture that relieves your IT department of non-mission-critical projects. Cloud-managed solutions allow you to administer one solution, hosted anywhere, and keep an overview of your print infrastructure without having to manage it every day.
Let’s delve more into why organizations are moving their IT infrastructures to the cloud.
Why Organizations are Moving to the Cloud
By 2025, 85% of organizations will be cloud-first. While there are many reasons for moving to the cloud, a few stand out. According to Deloitte, the main cloud migration drivers are data modernization, security governance, and lower print expenses.
📖 Read on → Why Move to the Cloud: 11 Reasons to Embrace the Cloud
Moving to the cloud is about taking a slot at the front end of market innovation. It’s about addressing the complexities within IT departments and pushing back on the current pressure to manage non-strategic work. That way, IT departments become modern and proactive. Additionally, IT teams become agile as the business grows, all while securing cost savings and digitalization.
📖 Read on → Understand the Cloud-Powered Digital Transformation Journey
In the world of print, on-premises infrastructures have seen their share of vulnerability and security attacks. This, in turn, has also become a key driver for companies moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Including print in a cloud first strategy gives you high security governance and protection mechanisms.
Get Ready for Cloud-Managed Print Services
Cloud readiness indicates if your data and applications can be moved to true cloud technology with minimal impact on operational continuity.
With a cloud readiness assessment, you can get a good grasp of what you should do to ensure migrating print applications to the cloud becomes a seamless project that aligns with your overall strategic business plan.
✅ Ready to evaluate your readiness? → Take the Cloud Readiness Quiz
The same description applies to cloud readiness for cloud-managed print services. Your cloud readiness level tells you how durable your print infrastructure is in the face of cloud migration. It also gives you an idea of how well your IT environment can withstand migration towards cloud architecture solution like YSoft SAFEQ Cloud.
Next, let's review 15 cloud readiness tips to move the needle on your digital transformation and cloud transition goals.
15 Cloud Readiness Tips
Whether you’re in the earlier or later stages of your cloud readiness evaluation, the following fifteen tips will help you make the right choices on what cloud managed print services software your business needs and set your IT department up for cloud success.
#1. Start With the Why
Don’t let the ‘why’ of your cloud migration initiative slip through your fingers. Listen to business leadership expert Simon Sinek–and start with your fundamental ‘Why?’.
🔊 Listen on → Simon Sinek, ‘Start with why’ TedTalk
Every business has its own reasons for wanting to embrace managed print services software, and you need to find yours, too. Truth is, there are a lot of viable reasons why you’d want to migrate from print servers to one full-featured cloud print server. Here are some of them:
📖 Read on → 5 Reasons to Move Your Print Infrastructure to the Cloud
#2. Set Smart Migration Goals
Smart goals are far from a strange concept today, but for the sake of clarity, here are the mandatory elements that make up smart goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
As part of embracing a cloud print strategy, you’ll need to establish a set of specific, measurable goals to track the success of your cloud migration project. Start by clearly explaining why.
Here’s a pro tip:
Identify specific goals, what your infrastructure must look like to achieve those goals, and what restraints you’ll have to address. This will help guide you to the right cloud deployment strategy.
Here’s a SMART goal example:
We want to modernize our print infrastructure and migrate it to a cloud-managed print services software to decrease print-related spending by 15% within the next 2 months while taking pressure off our maxed-out IT team.
#3. Make all Necessary Considerations
As you set goals for your migration, you’ll need to make considerations on what switching to managed print services software means to your business. This also includes how it will affect your current print infrastructure.
To make the preparation stage as easy as possible for you and your IT team, we’ve prepared a rundown of the key considerations to make for migrating from server to cloud. Amplify your cloud readiness with the article below:
📖 Read on → 5 Major Considerations for Migrating from Server to Cloud
#4. Interpret the Reconfiguration
The cloud is a different print software architecture type, not just a place to store your cloud prints. One part of assessing your cloud readiness is about understanding the scope of the reconfiguration and migration to managed print software.
We will replace numerous print servers with one dedicated server. Services replace databases and are likely to replace applications that interface with APIs. For instance, in SAFEQ Cloud, everything will be accessed through one modern API.
On top of that, the software we offer lets you manage multiple print devices, domains, and networks, with one full-featured single driver. This simplifies your print infrastructure, drives down maintenance costs, and gives you a ‘No Print Management’ solution.
📖 Read on → Say Goodbye to Print Management with SAFEQ Cloud
#5. The 6 R's of Cloud Migration
There are multiple, possible ways of migrating to the cloud which you can take advantage of. The different strategies are:
- Rehost: A popular migration strategy, known as “lift and shift.”
- Re-platform: Emulated cloud, compatible with fixed legacy systems
- Refactor or Rearchitect: Costly option for potential scalability
- Repurchase: Takes existing data and articulates in a cloud-based product
- Retain: This strategy retains some IT aspects on-premise/in-house
- Retire: Determine what print management tasks can be retired completely
A critical part of becoming cloud-ready is familiarizing youself with your options and drawing conclusions on which option will best suit your IT’s print needs.
Here’s a pro tip:
You don’t need to be an MPS expert to make appropriate evaluations. As long as you can draw some conclusions on what you think is best, a cloud print provider can help direct you toward the best print infrastructure setup for you.
#6. Monitor your MPS Software Migration
As with many other software migrations or implementations, you’ll need to closely supervise the migration as it’s happening to make sure the adoption is hassle-free and meets your pre-defined criteria. Especially given the previous tip, it’s critical that you monitor the strategy you’ve chosen and remain quick to tackle any potential issues or hurdles.
#7. Read up on Amplified Cloud SecuritY
In your cloud journey toward implementing managed print services software, you’ll realize that cloud architectures demand higher levels of security and additional compliance.
Once you move your print to the cloud, whether with a private, public, or hybrid model, new security mechanisms will take effect. The good news here is that security is embedded from the get-go with native cloud solutions.
While cloud providers can and do focus more on security than most enterprises will ever be able to, current solutions to detect and prevent security breaches in the cloud are different from on-premises. It is not just another network.
If you want to achieve maximum cloud readiness, read through these resources on cloud security:
📖 Read on:
→ The Future of Print Security: 8 Trends to Know Today
→ Protect your Data with a Zero-Trust Print Approach
→ How to Make Sure your Print Setup is GDPR Compliant
#8. Research your Hosting Options
Once you’ve set a goal to embrace the next step of your digital transformation, you’ll need to research what cloud options you have available. Depending on your unique business, different infrastructures will yield different results. This is why it’s important to know your goals in advance.
You can host your cloud environment as a:
- True cloud service (public) versus ‘hosted in the cloud’ solution
- Private or hybrid cloud Infrastructure
This tip ties back to tip five, where you see more cloud strategies available to you. Different managed print services software solutions offer different hosting options for your print infrastructure, so be sure to keep that in mind as we look at tip nine.
#9. Research your Vendor Options
Next up, it’s time to investigate your vendor options. We recommend that you allocate time to conduct serious vendor research, as vendors offer different infrastructures, different deal types, and much more. With a solution like SAFEQ Cloud, the software supports multiple vendors.
If cloud-managed print services are new to you, there’s value in being prepared with a list of questions you want to ask. To get you started, here’s a rundown of 6 questions for choosing a cloud printing solution.
#10. Investigate Benefits & Disadvantages
When it comes to managed print software, there’s a long list of high-value benefits to yield from. Here are a few of those benefits:
- Improve efficiency
- Reduce spending
- Improve cashflow
- Improve productivity
- Reduce capital expenditure
- Have a more agile IT department
- Improve your information security
- Take the pressure off IT teams
- Scale up as your business scales
#11. Learn What Cloud Can Do for Your IT Team
Cloud print solutions and MPS software exist for one reason, and one reason only. To relieve the burden on IT departments and teams. With a solution like SAFEQ Cloud, you can re-focus on mission-critical IT tasks, let go of print tickets and management, and step away from the pressure of handling multiple core IT infrastructures.
Businesses sometimes overlook using print in their cloud-first plans because they underestimate its benefits for IT teams. However, contrary to common belief, migrating to print in the cloud is usually safe and simple.
IT teams tend to maintain and supervise a variety of pressuring, complex projects, so by removing print management and replacing it with managed print services software, IT migraines can become a thing of the past.
With true cloud solutions, your team can say "NO" to Print Management!
#12. Leverage a Trial Before You Commit
Taking a step towards embracing cloud print software does not have to be about taking a leap of faith into unknown territory. Before investing in change, start by leveraging a trial that gives you comprehensive insights into what software you're potentially committing to.
Different vendors offer different depths of trials. At Y Soft, we want to make sure you get a complete look into what our cloud-first print management software offers, which is why we offer a free guided demo of SAFEQ Cloud.
📖 Read on → Access your Free Guided Demo of our SAFEQ Cloud
#13. Create a Cloud-First Strategy & Culture
It’s not enough to resolve the technical challenges of cloud migration. In your company, you’ll need to also consider the transition from a cultural perspective and understand how moving to cloud-managed print services software impacts employees and their daily workflow.
When employees are ready to wholeheartedly embrace the benefits that cloud solutions and managed print services offer, they will be more productive and engaged throughout the implementation, which amps up the chance of successful cloud adoption.
📖 Read on → Include Print in Your Cloud-First Strategy
#14. Leverage All the Best Features
Once you’ve committed to a cloud print software, investigate what features it offers and leverage all the features that best fit your print needs. Depending on the cloud provider and software you choose, you’ll quickly uncover features that relieve your IT team and make print an independent background process.
To give you an example, here are some incredible features to expect with SAFEQ Cloud:
- Pull printing (print roaming)
- Device-agnostic printing
- Serverless printing
- Location-aware printing
- Automated workflows
- Multi-factor authentication
- Operating systems integration
- True Identity Management
- … and much more
#15. Enjoy Your Cloud-Managed Print Software
Finally, enjoy your new software. Setting up with SAFEQ Cloud only takes 10 minutes, but adjusting to the new print architecture may require additional time. So, once you're done, enjoy it.
Your new print infrastructure will offer a waterfall of opportunities for your IT team to let go of stressful print management tasks. Instead, IT leads get to step back from print tickets and re-focus on more meaningful tasks.
If you want to learn more about cloud print software in a real-life context, we have a customer story you can learn from.
By removing VPNs alone, Ambiq Healthcare achieved an annual savings of 50,000 euros. Head here for Ambiq's cloud adoption case study.
If you need a break from reading, listen to Ambiq's story on our podcast instead.
FAQS & FINAL POINTS
It’s safe to say that there are a lot of elements that go into cloud readiness and positioning your business for migration success with cloud-managed print services software.
To wrap it up, here are a few frequently asked questions about cloud-managed services:
1) What are the Benefits of CLOUD-Managed Print Services?
- MPS software offers cost-cutting and money-saves
- Cloud-hosted services run on data centers that work incredibly fast
- Cloud solutions offer businesses a front seat in market innovation
- Cloud Software (like SAFEQ Cloud) is created to scale with you at your pace
- MPS and cloud print follow excellence-level security metrics
- Regardless of location, time, or device, the software is always available
- APIs allow cloud solutions to integrate with your on-prem printers easily
Learn about the advantages in detail:
📖 Read on → Why Move to the Cloud? Here are 11 Great Reasons
2) How do you Check Cloud Readiness?
When identifying cloud readiness, perform a cloud readiness assessment. A cloud readiness assessment lets businesses identify migration objectives, skill gaps, team potentials, scrutinize existing IT infrastructures, research security governance, assess operational readiness, and much more.
A cloud readiness assessment is an imperative first step that provides a solid footing before moving forward with cloud print migration plans. Take our free cloud readiness quiz below and get your results instantly!
