Print IT Reseller - issue 48

PRINT IT RESELLER.UK 27 SOLUTIONS The advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May in particular, has brought the requirement for organisations to rethink how best to secure content that flows in and out of their business even higher up the agenda. As the financial and reputational penalties for a data breach look set to increase further, companies are looking to vendors for solutions to secure network print devices through intrusion detection, whitelisting, encryption, self-healing BIOS and other tools. “Whilst the world is changing, some resellers aren’t keeping apace. What they should be doing to prepare and future- proof their business for 2018 and beyond, is looking ahead and taking the time to find out what new solutions are on the market that will help them help their customers,” Crump argues. The measures stated above only address part of the problem, principally external threats and network vulnerabilities. “In too many businesses, paper output remains untraceable, printed data can be quickly and easily removed, often without the victim ever being aware that their data security has been compromised,” he said. Crump warns that if resellers adopt the mindset that everyone is selling the same solutions, and focus on being competitive in other areas, the channel might be missing out on revenue. “In order to do something different you have to offer something different. “To prevent insiders from stealing data assets, you need something more than just secure printing. Pull printing on its own won’t stop a corrupt employee from printing and removing corporate or customer data. You need a means of monitoring the content of print jobs and, where appropriate, preventing them from being printed,” he said. With security now a key differentiator for printer and MFP vendors, Eric Crump, Director of Strategic Alliances at Ringdale, is urging resellers to conduct due diligence, and take a fresh look at what solutions are on the market Time to differentiate Data loss prevention Many businesses already make use of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions provided by companies like Symantec, Digital Guardian and Intel Security to monitor digital communications for key words or patterns (e.g. strings of numbers). However, Crump argues that few organisations apply the same supervision to printed documents, even though print jobs contain the same confidential or valuable data. DLP is a growing requirement for mid-market to very large enterprises, such as banks, insurance companies, retail, government and healthcare organisations. “They need to protect data, and that needs to go beyond just printing with a badge,” he said. FollowMe offers DLP as an integrated feature and has just been recognised by Keypoint Intelligence - Buyers Lab (BLI) as the Outstanding Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solution in their 2018 Software Pick Awards. FollowMe analyses the content of a print job as it goes from the desktop or mobile device to the printer. If it detects a key word or number string, it can stop a print job from printing, send an email alert and archive a copy for further processing, to ascertain whether there has been a breach of security. Where printing is authorised, documents can be printed with a ‘Confidential’ watermark, the action recorded and an administrator alerted. FollowMe has had some form of DLP capability since it invented the concept 20 years ago. “FollowMe is actually a Data Loss Prevention product in itself,” Crump said, adding: “Because you have to tap your badge or type a PIN before you can release a print job, you are already preventing the loss of information that typically just sits in the output bin. As reported by Quocirca this year, 61 per cent of companies have had a data breach due to paper sitting in the output bin.” He continued: “Over the last six years, as customers have told us they want to protect certain information, we have been able to work together to deliver bespoke DLP solutions that enable them to prevent data breaches by monitoring print jobs for account numbers, key words and national ID numbers. Then, in August 2016, we introduced DLP as an integrated capability for our partners.” Working with partners With the content monitoring solution available to partners, Ringdale is continuing to assist them to win new business by incorporating these enhanced IT security countermeasures into their security offerings. “We work with partners and their customers to understand what kind of information they are trying to protect and who has access to that information. Together, we build a strategy around document security that is consistent with To prevent insiders from stealing data assets, you need something more than just secure printing Continued..