There has been a question raised about printers and that is if they have hard drives built in them. Although the answer to this is “yes”, it would still be advisable to have your machines checked. In this modern technology, multifunction printers have hard drives for memory storage. The older models of personal printers may have a memory but not necessarily hard drives. Older versions of commercial copier machines, however, have them.
The printing machines you have in your office are helping you make tasks easier. With the recent models, printers now can also scan, fax, receive and send emails, which means that it can efficiently accommodate huge bulk of information being fed into them. For each transaction made using the printer, a copy of the document will be stored within the hard drive.
Security in the office involves printers and copiers.
No matter what type of business you are running, you cannot deny the fact that you are keeping a lot of information on your machine’s hard drive. To an extent, it may even include your list of clients and details of workers. The hard drive could be holding sensitive personal data and even confidential business information. For those under regulated industries like financial services and healthcare providers, there is a need to comply to certain laws when handling this information. At all times, remember to never allow your printer or its hard drive leave your office to avoid security issues no matter how small the breach is.
How to properly handle of your printer’s hard drive
The next step is knowing how to handle the data within your hard drive. Depending on what type of business and how large of a data you are handling, there is a way to clear out your hard drives for security reasons. It is also important to check the manuals included during the purchase of these devices as there are instructions already provided on how to empty your hard drives. For those who are leasing these machines, you may need to contact your service provider before doing anything on the machine.
You may check this list for possible solutions for deleting or emptying your hard drives:
- Clear cached data. By simply doing this on the copier interface every time you are handling printing works, then you are already eliminating even the slightest possibility of exposing classified data.
- Digitally, you may overwrite your hard drive. You can either do it yourself or you can also contact professional business copier solutions to do the job for you.
- There is always the option to reformat your drives. Make sure to check the steps on the manual for proper guidance.
- This is one of the best functions of modern copiers. With this, you can easily clear or empty your drives on your own.
It pays to know your business copier features, especially those that will be extremely beneficial to the company. The last thing you will need is scramble on securing your hard drives at the last minute, just a second before security is put to great risk. In the long run, this will take a load off from your busy office knowing that you are on top of your business.