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Today, the pressure on organisations of all types to cut costs is greater than ever. At the same time, these organisations are looking to increase service levels, boost productivity, improve business agility and reduce their carbon footprint. It is a circle that's not easy to square.

Yet it can be done. As cloud becomes the go-to delivery mechanism for IT services, due to an increased appreciation for the benefits, businesses are turning to cloud hosting solutions in their droves to alleviate both the stress and costs of hardware management.

One simple way to reduce expenses is to radically revisit the way the printing function is handled across the organisation. In many ways, this is an untapped method of increasing efficiency.

Although some believe printing is a 'twilight technology', it remains a key business enabler, and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future. If you don't believe printing costs are an important issue, then think again. Gartner has estimated that up to 3% of an organisation's total revenue is spent on print, which can work out at thousands, if not millions, of pounds. Printing represents a perfect method of cutting your costs.

The question is: how? By leveraging a managed cloud print service (MCPS). Installing an enterprise-wide print management system, hosted in the cloud, means you can save substantial money, while improving many other key aspects of performance and reducing the printing headache for your IT department.

RESPONDING TO CHANGING BUSINESS NEEDS
Put simply, a managed cloud print service is a solution to enterprise-wide print management. It is leading a printing revolution, which is a world away from the static traditional printing networks of the past.

A MCPS uses a cloud-based print network to manage the printing needs across the entire organisation. For businesses spanning several offices, headquarters, and countries, this is ideal. For those in smaller enterprises, it enables complete scalability. It's flexible, it's responsive, and it cuts costs while reducing the administrative burden of managing a printing network spanning tens, hundreds or even thousands of printers.

And managed cloud printing has been developed to meet the changing business needs of our time. As printer fleets have evolved and expanded, many organisations find themselves operating multiple print servers to support their individual printing requirements.

This brings its own obvious advantages, by providing a more resilient network and avoiding heavy network traffic, but it also creates specific challenges, including a substantial IT cost and administrative burden.

Typically, for each site a business operates from, it needs one server and one print server for every 100 print devices. As you can imagine, this adds up. For a 1000-user organisation with just three sites, 11 servers could be needed.

This heavy dependency on physical print-servers can lead to higher costs, device and driver deployment, poor print management and redundancy issues. And we've seen this first hand - it's not unheard of for companies to have up to twenty surplus servers, which is an expensive waste! How do you eliminate the need for a server network? By virtualising the print infrastructure. A MCPS replaces the traditional physical print server, hosted on-site, with a private print network that uses 'virtual print servers' hosted in the cloud.

If you virtualise your print infrastructure, you can expect massive financial savings in return. And that's just the start. Cloud printing brings you higher security, control, agility, productivity and network resilience.

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