This is the third and final post in a series covering five main security concerns and how PrinterLogic addresses them. And as I said at the end of my second post, this one might even be the most important.
It’s about cyberattacks.
It wasn’t all that long ago that cyberattacks seemed like a peripheral threat. Sure, there were always script kiddies knocking at the door, and once in a while, you’d see something serious emerge with the media educating us on a widespread vulnerability that was ripe for exploitation. But on the whole, as long as your software was reasonably up to date, you weren’t biting your nails every time a device connected to the Internet.
How times have changed.
The rate of what is arguably the most public-facing form of cybercrime, malicious e-mails, soared 600% during the pandemic. However, according to a survey by McAfee for its 2020 report The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime, the less visible threats of malware and spyware now pose the biggest financial risk to organizations. Cybercrime Magazine has predicted that global cybercrime costs will amount to $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025 — up from $3 trillion in 2015.
In short, cybercrime is a money maker. Malicious actors are now more organized, savvy, and mobilized than ever. They’ve grown bolder and more sophisticated.
With cyberattacks, it’s no longer a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. Software is developed, installed, configured, and used by humans—so it’s never going to be impervious. And unfortunately, there are a lot of other humans who will seize any chance they get to exploit a chink in the armor. Of the 1,500 companies included in McAfee’s report, only 4% had managed to avoid some form of cyber incident in (pre-pandemic) 2019.
Every organization is going to feel the sting at some point.
The good news is your hands aren’t tied. There are solutions. Cybercrime mitigation and prevention are already baked into the way companies like ours are delivering and maintaining software in the SaaS era.
Classic software models used a more protracted release cycle. You’d install a software solution on-prem, often taking a wait-and-see approach to gradual updates that enhanced functionality or plugged security holes. The typical cycle was measured in months or even years.
But then news of an exploit would emerge. CVE-1234 could enable a user to gain control of the entire network by printing a black-and-white document in color! Then it was a race to adjust settings, disable functionality and limit access in the immediate term while you waited weeks and weeks for a patch to arrive. PrintNightmare, which I addressed in the “Attack Surfaces” section of this post series, is an obvious example of the drawbacks of this old-school approach.
Cloud-native SaaS solutions like PrinterLogic, by contrast, are both more proactive and more responsive. They’re constantly being updated behind the scenes to pre-empt possible exploits and close existing loopholes. It’s like getting into your car every morning with the knowledge that it received a full tune-up, comprehensive safety inspection, and performance upgrade sometime during the night.
Our SaaS platform saw a record-breaking number of code deployments in April 2022 alone. During that month, we issued rolling updates that improved functionality or addressed potential security gaps about one hundred times a day.
And here’s the best part: Once those deployments become common code, every single one of our SaaS customers is updated at the server level. There’s no more damage control followed by a long, anxious wait for a security patch that IT then has to apply across the board. Instead, vulnerabilities can be addressed universally in a matter of hours.
We’re also working on some exciting functionality that will further capitalize on the advantages of this architecture. In the future, every software component that’s part of the PrinterLogic solution—from agents to clients—will be able to receive automatic rolling background updates.
Agility like that is how you manage cyberattacks. It’s also how PrinterLogic’s modern SaaS approach saves time, headaches, and costs several times over.
Summary
In this three-part series, I’ve covered five security-related topics that are of prime importance to C-suite executives and IT departments:
- Minimizing the attack surface
- Protecting data
- Embracing Zero Trust
- Safely supporting remote work
- Mitigating cyberattacks
I’ve also shown how each of these intersects the print environment, and how PrinterLogic fits into the equation—and even changes the rules of the game. Between our serverless, SaaS platform and our new Advanced Security Bundle, we solve the most pressing security issues.
We achieve this through capabilities such as:
- Eliminating and consolidating print infrastructure
- Offering concurrent support for leading IdPs
- Multifactor authentication (MFA)
- Secure Release Printing with easy badging
- Smartphone print release with QR codes
- Role-based access control
- Off-Network Printing for remote workers
- Automatic and timely SaaS updates
Of course, there’s a lot more to the PrinterLogic solution. We streamline printer and driver management, cut print-related help desk calls by allowing users to install printers on their own, and offer three bundles to further extend PrinterLogic’s functionality, including Advanced Security, Cost Management, and Output Management.