Today’s output hardware, especially those at performance levels that can supply your company’s full staff with networked printing services, often includes built-in hard drives that complement the embedded miniature computer at the heart of these devices’ capabilities. These features usually appear on laser printers and multi-function devices, which may be laser copiers or inkjet copiers. If your office printer includes these capabilities, you can benefit from the performance advantages at the expense of increased security concerns.
Enterprise or Workgroup Class Devices
Numerous printers that are made for multi-user environments have hard drives, have traditional platter-based units or they have flash-memory storage, designed to speed the output of a lot of documents printed at or near the same time. Relieving the need for spooled document retention on individual users’ computers, these hard drives give an expedited means of making output data available to printing hardware. Unless you print a configuration page, check the installed options listed on your lease or your purchase agreement, or examine the device’s back panel for signs of a hard drive, you may be unable to know between devices with on-board storage and devices that do not have it.
Multi-function printers
Internal hard drives form a common feature on devices that scan, print, fax, and email. Multi-function printers or MFPs, enable hard drives to coordinate the simultaneous performance of their many functions. Because of those close usage and configuration similarities between these devices and their slightly bigger copier counterparts, MFPs target a lot of the same needs for offices with fewer users and less document traffic than those that use networked copiers. Depending on the level of performance of the printer, the price and intended workgroup size, an MFP may include a hard drive as a standard or optional feature.
Hold and back up
The inclusion of an internal hard drive enables output devices to offer workgroups the ability to send a document to the printer, ho,d it for later output and make multiple copies at different times from a saved set of data. Hardware setups that include individual user IDs make it possible for this feature to give document-access security. On the internal hard drives of MFPs also support retention of faxed material in the event of a lack of printing supplies.
Security considerations
When your business decommissions a leased or buy output device, its hard drive can form a security risk because of the prospect of sensitive data remaining on the disk. Together with security provisions to protect these devices while they are in service, including password protection of Web-based access to your output hardware, you need a security policy to address data destruction when you retire your equipment. Printers that are leased must be returned in working order, which means you can’t simply destroy their drives. Some printer manufacturers offer an optional data or standard erasure software product that you can use to wipe or overwrite the drives in their devices that include them.
Whether a particular copier saves every digitized document or not depends on the brand of the copier and how it is configured. It took some effort but experts have found out the MFPs that offices are responsible for do not retain images by default. It needs to be set properly. It is best to make sure that your management understands what information is readily available on the MFPs and how to protect it.
If you are looking for a Copier for your business, you may contact Clear Choice Technical Services Rutherford. You can ask about Copier Leasing Services, Copier rental services, IT Services, and even Copier Repair services.