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Print, print management and cloud: a Y Soft primer

Weather reports aside, the Cloud is a data center (or multiple linked data centers) with a robust, secure Internet connection. Cloud vendors maintain and support the data center and its tenants, in compliance with the appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

WHAT’S THE CLOUD REALLY?

The Cloud enables organizations to:

• Move infrastructure off-premises (IaaS) This lightens the IT load, reduces the financial burden and frees up space in the office

• Host software off-premises (SaaS) This makes applications accessible and accountable from anywhere with an Internet connection

• Manage a hardware/software solution or platform off-premises, platform as a service (PaaS) This liberates customers and partners from geographic constraints

WHAT’S THE BUSINESS MODEL?

Moving to the Cloud means that instead of owning and servicing your own infrastructure and software applications on site, you subscribe to them. 

(Think about it. When you subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t have to gather, write and publish the news yourself. More importantly, you don't have to own a printing press either! When you subscribe to a newspaper, it just gets delivered—as a service.)

Hosting business services and applications in the Cloud delivers numerous business benefits, including:

• Improved support 
• Increased resilience 
• More deployment options 
• Automatically scales to handle periods of peak printing 
• Lower costs
• Moving associated costs from capital to operational expenses
• Enhanced security 

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLOUD PRINTING AND CLOUD PRINT MANAGEMENT?

Cloud Printing is the ability to securely print to any printer anywhere with an Internet connection.  A cloud print service connects digital devices like smartphones, laptops, and workstations with printer stations. Facilitated by a small form-factor appliance (OMNI Bridge) at the business location or at home, it has proved to be a robust, easy-to-use and affordable print solution for mobile and at-home workers as well as small and midsized businesses (SMBs).  

Cloud Print Management delivers the print governance and business analytics that enterprises need to monitor the secure usage and manage the cost of print services across multiple business locations globally.

ARE MY BUSINESS DOCUMENTS SECURE IN THE CLOUD?

In addition to the robust security assured by reliable Internet and data center providers, Y Soft employs additional strategies and devices to keep business content completely safe.

• Y Soft Cloud Print Management natively separates document content and the print system metadata that yields business insights. With SAFEQ Managed, print jobs are sent to the Cloud and back so, document content and print traffic remain onsite. The SAFEQ software itself was designed to meet and even exceed the highest security standards.
• The use of an on-premises OMNI server-less device lets SMBs, too, keep content safe onsite, as well as helping to maintain on-premises Internet service if bandwidth is slow.

HOW IS CLOUD PRINT MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORTED?

Support is Y Soft’s sweet spot. It’s what differentiates us from other vendors. Partner and User Support is available worldwide and delivers pre-sale and post-sale support, as well as training. Any company directly supported by Y Soft or a Y Soft Certified Partner receives training at YSoft eUniversity to ensure that knowledgeable experts are always on hand and up to speed. With our acquisition of EveryonePrint, we’ve expanded our team of support experts, which ensures higher availability for partners and users during support-availability hours. Support services are offered by subscription at basic and premium levels.

WHAT ABOUT UPTIME?

Uptime’s middle name is resilience. Our SAFEQ Cloud products were designed to be hosted on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, which in turn was created with resilience, security, speed and serviceability built in.  Our Cloud products are containerized for security and performance using Azure Kubernetes Services.

Our EveryonePrint Cloud product is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in five different locations with three availability zones per location, offering Cloud high availability and little-to-no downtime.

Subscribers choose the levels of resilience they require to maintain availability to their print management services, at home and around the world.

Now you know the basics, drop us a line and see how you can take advantage of Cloud printing too!

JIM WIESER

Jim calls New York home and, when not traveling to visit with partners and customers, he enjoys spending time with his family and scuba diving. As a professional scuba diving trainer and master dive instructor, he is literally under water a lot. When he comes up for air, he can tell you a lot about owning his own businesses and his previous work at OpenText, Xerox and Eastman Kodak.
 

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