Why print modernisation part 2: Security

Security solutions for your users and devices in today’s hyper-connected world are vital to safeguard your business data – and documentation requires robust and flexible solutions, wherever your people are.

Putting the right print and scanning solutions helps businesses to navigate the frontiers of risk across cyberspace. Triple-layer security protects devices, provides document confidentiality and locks out infiltrators from accessing networks, giving organisations the confidence that their data remains protected.

5 reasons Brother is the secure print partner of choice for our customers

  • With triple-layer security built in as standard, Brother’s professional technology solutions put secure printing first.
  • Advanced document and device security gives you the confidence your business’s data remains protected.
  • End-to-end encryption and port-based access control allow your teams to connect to your print device network and share documents securely.
  • For added peace of mind, SecurePrint software further protects important documents.
  • Tackle your frontiers of risk and choose Brother’s print solutions to protect confidential information and lock out infiltrators from your business.

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Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

 

Futureproofing business with Brother

In what is likely to be one of the most enduring side effects of the pandemic, employees and organisations across the UK have felt the benefit of less commuting and more work-life balance.

With this, the more flexible employers can be, there is a realisation that they can be more effective. That means equipping people with solutions to remain productive, wherever they may be.

That includes an all-round resilient, flexible print solution that works at home, in a co-working hub, or in the office.

How Brother and Complete IT Systems help

Brother can tick all the boxes. For home users, Brother users can benefit from compact multifunction desktop devices that enable simple and secure printing and scanning.

In the office, touch-free decentralised printing means staff can reduce the risk of infection, respect social distancing and improve productivity at the same time.

In the hub, Brother’s print and scan devices mean you can create documents for meetings in serviced offices, for
example, without having to send them to shared printers using unfamiliar networks.

Remote IT support desk services, with a team of experts who can resolve any issues remotely, wherever they are.

Brother are working to design bespoke print solutions that are making businesses more resilient and ready to take on whatever challenges and opportunities the future might bring.

See how other organisations are adapting

To understand its importance, Brother UK recruited an expert panel of IT decision-makers, academics, and advisors to look at how firms are introducing new technology to build business resilience. Those businesses with robustness and agility will be best placed to survive both short-term shocks and longer periods of uncertainty.

The report helps in highlighting the role technology must play and help IT decision-makers with the choices they make in enabling their organisations to futureproof.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

Three ways to create a resilient print solution

Futureproofing your business has become all the more important with the changes forced upon us by the Covid-19 pandemic and digitisation trends.

Every business is different, but there are also commonalities.

With Complete IT Systems and Brother, you can create your all-round solution to suit every need with three simple steps:
  1. Comprehensive device options including industry-leading SMB laser printers for the office and compact multifunction desktop devices for home to enable simple and secure printing and scanning in any environment.
  2. Touch-free de-centralised printing with Secure print+, enabling social distancing and reducing the risk of infection in office, while improving productivity by making print processes quick and easy.
  3. Ensure users have access to remote IT support, with a team of experts who can resolve any issues remotely, wherever they are.
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Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

 

How do experts build business resilience?

IT professionals face significant challenges in adapting operations to new ways of working. Sara Diggle, Head of SMB print business unit at Brother UK recently spoke to technology experts from KPMG, Moneypenny, Weightmans, and Alliance Manchester Business School to produce a comprehensive report about where resilience priorities should lie.

Building resilient businesses in the post-pandemic economy

The magnitude and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic placed unforeseen pressures on even the most robust business continuity plans in organisations operating in every sector, from retail to professional services.

The economic and social repercussions have driven systemic changes in every business model, demanding leaders to inject greater flexibility and new resources to ensure they can respond quickly. From delivering reliable and secure remote working options to changing product offerings and shifting sales channels online, adaptability has continued to be a key factor for those organisations that have responded most effectively over the last 12 months.

And, technology has played an essential role in their success.

Overnight, the first lockdown forced the hands of many technologies and IT decision-makers, compelling them to rapidly adopt and integrate new solutions or face grinding to a halt. Many organisations shoehorned several years of digital transformation into just a few months, from rapidly scaling up cloud systems and rolling out new-generation hardware, to driving app development and introducing new security architecture.

But despite a return to normality being within society’s grasp, we can’t press pause. This renewed focus on resilience, enabled by technology, will not be a temporary shift. According to IDC, the market intelligence firm, enterprises that are focused on resiliency will be able to react to disruption 50% faster than rivals in the future.

2020 showed us that technology has a key role to play in making businesses more robust in the face of disruption, enabling them to quickly and seamlessly pivot to new ways of working.

To understand its importance, Brother UK recruited an expert panel of IT decision-makers, academics, and advisors to look at how firms are introducing new technology to build business resilience. Those businesses with robustness and agility will be best placed to survive both short-term shocks and longer periods of uncertainty.

The report helps in highlighting the role technology must play and help IT decision-makers with the choices they make in enabling their organisations to become more resilient.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

 

Building business resilience with print – top tips

Building business resilience with print is front-of-mind for management teams. This is especially true as they step down from crisis stations and find the headspace to plan for the future.

It’s a focus that’s already seeping into IT procurement decisions. Firms want to harness solutions that can offset the impact of future disruption following a year of overcoming challenges.

We spoke to Sara Diggle, Head of SMB print business unit at Brother UK. She told us what decision makers need on their checklists when searching for new print systems with the end-goal of building resilience.

Agility

Cloud and the internet of things enabled print technology is allowing systems to be more decentralised. This means maintenance and support needs to be available wherever a device may be.

Managed print services (MPS) can easily be rolled out across a businesses’ network of offices, or even among home workers. This should still allow for full oversight by IT managers. Solutions like Brother’s remote panel, offers quick diagnosis and problem solving without the need to send out an engineer.

Security

Modern print devices offer end-to-end encryption. Manufacturers like Brother provide regular firmware updates that help end-users to stay one step ahead of hackers.

But sensitive information printed by devices can also fall into the wrong hands. Brother’s Secure Print+ solution offers easy-to-manage card-based user authentication. This ensures documents are only printed when they’re ready to collect from the printer.

Reliability

Remote diagnostics available through MPS can spot issues for end-users before problems arise. This keeps device uptime high. Meanwhile, Brother’s Request Help solution helps to ensure any problems are resolved quickly. This means users can contact an engineer via a printer’s interface.

Predictability

Predicting costs is central to building resilience. Setting monthly fees for MPS programmes helps businesses forecast costs. This is easier than managing in-house costs with potential repair and breakdown costs to factor in. Supplies replenishment also ensures that end-users don’t have to order in inks and toners. This avoids waiting for them to arrive if they run out, causing downtime.

COVID-secure

While the vaccine rollout picks up pace, we’re likely to be living with COVID-19 for some time. This means IT decision makers need to ensure that shared devices can be used safely.

A decentralised approach to print can be a safer choice for businesses. This means using tailored devices located across an office, rather than having a central multifunction device where users have to queue for use.

Scalability

While additional devices can easily be added to an MPS programme, devices themselves can build scalability. Brother’s flagship devices can be equipped with additional print trays, mailbox trays and automatic stapling. This boosts capacity when needed for fast-growing offices.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

How a UK school reduced print costs but kept performance

The challenge:

Helsby High School wanted to reduce the 100 printers on-site to reduce costs whilst maintaining quality and efficiency to print in volume.

The solution:

The school standardised with Brother printers, choosing a selection of high-speed mono and colour lasers, A3 inkjets, and installed b-guard to help manage print costs.

Products: Brother HL-4570CDW and HL-6180DW.

The benefit:

By reducing the printer suite from 100 to just 52, Helsby High School has halved overall running costs and at the same time increased efficiency. As part of a complete printing review, Helsby High School introduced highspeed workgroup mono lasers (HL-6180DW), efficient colour laser printers (HL-4570CDW) and A3 inkjets to satisfy the requirements of the art department. Brother installed b-guard, its print management solution, to provide the IT department with complete visibility and control of their new printer suite. b-guard allows administrators to control costs by setting print quotas for students or departments, enforcing duplex printing and locking functions of a machine to certain users.

What the customer said:

“We need printers in school that can cope with high volume printing, reliably, efficiently and cost effectively. We print about 4 million copies in a year so speed and duplex printing is important, but so is quality.

The main driver for this project was to reduce our spiralling printer costs. By standardising to Brother printers, we’ve been able to halve the number of printers on site, considerably reducing our total cost of ownership with fewer printers to run and fewer consumables to purchase. Now using b-guard we can measure our print usage and adjust where printers are placed for maximum performance going forward. Brother have delivered the cost savings we wanted without losing performance. In fact, Brother’s machines are proving so efficient, reliable and good print quality, we’re achieving far more with less.”

Steve Ford, Strategic ICT Manager, Helsby High School.

Complete IT Systems and Brother

See how Complete IT Systems and Brother can help your business here.

 

 

Have you invested smartly in your print estate?

“Doing more with less” is one of those terms that has been around for years. For so long in fact, there is a risk that it stops meaning anything. In fact, a search for “doing more with less” on Google brings up 2.4 billion results.

In this article, we will put a little more meat on the bone, and use a recent survey of 501 IT decision makers by Brother UK to examine how investment in your company’s print estate can enhance productivity during these times.

During the coronavirus pandemic, many businesses have needed to look for creative ways of enhancing the productivity of existing employees rather than hiring and creating new roles. With more and more pressure on people to work from home and balance family life with work life, this is not an easy task.

The survey found that awareness of the benefits of enhancing productivity are widespread and well understood. Almost three quarters (77% to be precise) of those businesses leaders surveyed have systems in place to identify opportunities to improve and eliminate wastage. This is real life “doing more with less” in practice.

Yet this still leaves 23% of businesses that have not identified processes and systems to try to improve from within.

Improving productivity is a key focus for SMEs.

An interesting finding in the survey was that 93% of the business leaders surveyed recognised the need to improve productivity. However, what practical steps businesses are taking to improve productivity varies by company size.
82% of the companies surveyed by Brother UK with more than 500 employees monitor or measure productivity. This number reduces to 77% of the companies with less than 500 employees.

Productivity and investment in your print estate

As we know, there can be a gap between recognising and saying something, and actually doing it in practice. While Brother UK’s survey results showed that SMEs are quite clear that there are gains to be made through productivity, only 21% are focussing on making additional IT investment to address it.

Brother – designed for productivity

Legacy printers can be one of the biggest time constraints and administrative burdens for SME employees. From trying to print from slower machines to the time spent on ordering supplies and carrying out maintenance, ageing printers really can be a burden to productivity.

Read more about Brother’s cloud-based managed print services that offer benefits such as automated supplies ordering and remote maintenance.

In our next article in this series we will explore in more detail how smart leaders are investing in productivity. In the meantime, you can find out more with Brother UK’s handy guide – “Solving the SMB productivity puzzle”.

Read more about how you can boost productivity your organisation in Brother’s Guide to Improving Your Print Productivity.

Find out more

Give us a call on 01274 396 213 to find out how Complete IT Systems and Brother can help your business. Alternatively have a look at our main Brother information page here.

 

4 steps to reducing business printing costs

Cost management is a vital component of any technology solution. So Complete IT Systems and Brother have some simple solutions designed to minimise the financial impact on organisations.

1: Save on toner

Reduce toner consumption when printing, copying and receiving faxes.

Save money by reducing the frequency of replacement consumables purchases, while also having a positive impact on the environment. And better still, using Brother’s “Toner Save Mode” does not affect the print speed or memory usage of the device.

2: Condense pages

Make an organisational commitment to using less paper by condensing multiple pages into a single sheet of paper.

N-in-1 printing reduces paper usage compared to standard printing helping companies to reduce their environmental impact and work towards their green credentials.

3: Reduce the number of pages users can print

Save money by controlling the number of pages each user can print.

Brother’s “Secure Function Lock” enables administrators to set daily, weekly or even monthly print allowances for each user. Once the limit has been reached, the Brother device will stop printing until the user’s allowance is increased or reset. Compatible devices also support NFC card authentication.

4: Implement NFC authentication

Retrieve printing documents in the confidence that they have not been read, copied or taken by anyone else.

The secure print function ensures documents are not printed until they are released by the machine’s control panel by using an NFC card.

Find out more

Give us a call on 01274 396 213 to find out how to order and claim your cashback.

Complete IT Systems and Brother

See how Complete IT Systems and Brother can help your business here.

 

NHS special print & toner offers

As an awarded and trusted NHS Supply Chain partner, we’ll be bringing some great deals to you on a regular basis. This week we have some great HP and Brother printer and toner deals for you. HP Offer – only £13.99 each or a pack of 4 (all colours) for only £40.00! WAN3904 Comp HP […]

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