8 best ways to print confidential documents securely
Before I get into the sure fire ways to print your sensitive documents securely, first I want you to understand all the points where your print jobs are vulnerable. Think of your print job’s journey. There are vulnerabilities before you press print, while you press print, and after you press print. To protect your print jobs, you need to secure them during every step of the print lifecycle.
1. Secure Print Release
This is the bread and butter of secure printing. Secure Print Release means that your jobs don’t automatically spit out at your printer. They wait inside a hold-and-release queue until your users are literally standing at the printer where they will collect their jobs. The document will only print when your user confirms they are there to collect the printout.
2. Find-me Printing (AKA Pull Printing)
Secure Print Release sounds like it could possibly be inconvenient. As in, you’d have to walk all the way to the same printer every time. That’s where a pull printing or Find-me printing overlay comes in handy. With Find-me printing, your print job sits in a virtual queue at all enabled printers in your workplace. It will only print at the printer you go to and authenticate with your ID.
3. User authentication
All secure printing rests on authentication. To collect a document, your users should verify their identity to confirm it is them, the one who pressed print, collecting the document. Both Secure Print Release and Find-me/Pull printing are made possible with user authentication . Here are the various ways you can configure authentication in your print environment.
Card Reader Release - Users verify with a security card/fob/badge
PIN Number release - Users verify with a personalized numerical code
Mobile phone - Users verify by releasing with their mobile phone
Username/password - Users verify with their confidential, individual details
Two-factor/2FA authentication
To literally double the strength of your authentication , you can configure 2FA. You’ll see this with many phone, banking, and software services. In order to verify your identity, you must supply two forms of authentication, which can be a combination of any of the above (i.e. PIN and a security card/fob/badge).
4. Secure your MFD with embedded software
Transform your printer’s usability experience with embedded print management software. The embedded software automates features such as user authentication for Secure Print Release and Find-me/pull printing. Securing your MFD with centralized print management software means ease-of-use for users, while giving sysadmins a centralized administration console from which they can implement secure device setup and protocols.
5. Encryption
Encryption is the backbone of secure communications technology. It’s why we use mobile internet banking without a second thought. All data is scrambled during the printing process with print management software, adding yet another layer of protection to your print environment. Our cloud-native solutions PaperCut Hive and PaperCut Pocket are equipped with end-to-end encryption where all metadata is encrypted at rest and motion with a 3-part key. With our self-hosted solutions, PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF, sensitive and confidential documents can be protected with spool file encryption using the AES-256-GCM algorithm which also uses multi-part keys - meaning every print job has a unique encryption key.
6. Print policies
Set rules and guidelines to ensure default best secure printing practices. Sysadmins can set simple pop-up reminders or automatically enforce rules like watermarking and digital signature (discussed below).
7. Document afterlife care
Protecting your confidential information after you’ve pressed print is possibly the trickiest part of print security. Print management software offers you a variety of options to secure your printed documents once they’ve become a piece of paper:
- Logging - view the origin, time, user, and document details for a print job
- Archiving - view the original document if required
- Reporting - customizable insights into your print environment
- Watermarking and digital signatures - trace and identify the user and source of the print job
Find out more about PaperCut’s printing visibility tools for document security.
8. Talk to your printing partner
We strongly encourage speaking to your print partner about how to secure your confidential documents. They’re the on-ground experts who regularly help organizations of all shapes and sizes with various needs of how to secure confidential and sensitive information.
Read the original article by PaperCut Software's Kieron Byatt here.
