Print IT Reseller - issue 48

01732 759725 28 SOLUTIONS what they are doing in their IT strategy,” Crump said. FollowMe uncovers high risk areas and enables organisations to understand how they are processing data, in order to apply the relevant level of control to secure and make the printing process compliant. One area that Ringdale takes great care over is change management, so that if an employee does print something they shouldn’t, perhaps accidentally, they receive an email or print-out explaining that their attempt to print the document was in contravention of the company’s document security policy. Crump points out that, as well as demonstrating the company’s commitment to document security, such messages help reduce help desk calls from people who don’t know why a document isn’t printing. “Another thing we focus on is making everything easy for the channel partner or the customer. One of the reasons most of our channel partners work with us is because there is not much they need to do on the post-sales side. After FollowMe has been installed, it pretty much works. The channel partner doesn’t have to send people out to fix problems or adjust things to make it work, and customers are happy because the product just works,” he said. Vendor-neutral solution Another way in which Ringdale has an advantage over other solutions is support for multi-vendor print fleets. This, says Crump, is critical when the channel is dealing with mid-market and large enterprises that might have legacy devices and different brand choices in regional or branch offices. “There are plenty of basic pull printing solutions on the market today. But when you start looking at very specific customer requirements, there’s less choice. Quocirca says 70 per cent of organisations have a mixed-vendor fleet and we are one of the only multi-vendor fleet DLP providers on the market. A solution from one of the OEMs is not going to work effectively across a multi-vendor fleet. For that, you need an advanced solution like FollowMe,” he added. Unique selling points According to Crump, FollowMe has a number of unique selling points compared to competitor offerings. “The industrial strength of the product is one of the major advantages. Some larger organisations need a product to work with 10s of 1,000s of employees – and we can enable that. FollowMe is also designed to work efficiently and economically across multiple sites. Branch office printing, for example, removes the need for and cost of a dedicated print server in every office. He continued: “For highly distributed offices we have lightweight software that runs on a workstation and does the work of the server. It holds the print job and waits until the user taps a badge on the printer before releasing it. Then it sends that auditing information back to head office. It just sends small bits of information back to the server at head office rather than the whole print job.” The DLP component works in the same way, depending on what the customer wants to achieve, making it easier and cheaper for multi-site organisations to apply consistent data security controls across their entire enterprise. The same applies to mobile devices. “If someone is printing from a smartphone or tablet, we can analyse the documents coming from those devices. Some competing products don’t support printing from mobile devices as a native capability and have to add another package from another vendor. This involves another server agreement and another level of complexity. With FollowMe, DLP and mobile printing are part of the native product so anything that is printed is audited, analysed and managed.” GDPR compliance FollowMe’s ability to secure data through the monitoring and management of print jobs from computers, tablets and smartphones plugs a hole in many a data security strategy and enables organisations to apply the same control to printed information that is routinely applied to email and digital assets. FollowMe’s secure print, encryption and DLP capabilities are widely used by organisations to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act (GLBA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). The solution can also help companies meet the requirements of the GDPR and be advantageous for ongoing data protection impact assessments (DPIAs). “We believe that less than one quarter of organisations are going to be GDPR-ready by the deadline,” said Crump. “We know that most are not considering printing as part of that scenario. Quocirca research shows that a minority (48 per cent) have considered printing as part of their GDPR strategy and while they may have considered it, we don’t know whether they have introduced solutions or processes to secure their infrastructure and improve their document processes. The channel should be working with customers and prospects, ensuring that printing is being considered as part of their GDPR strategy,” he said in conclusion. To find out more about FollowMe please call the Ringdale team on 01444 871349 or alternatively download the BLI solution assessment from www.followme.ringdale.com The channel should be working with customers and prospects, ensuring that printing is being considered as part of their GDPR strategy • 2 0 1 7 • ...continued