The print industry is at a critical point where it must build momentum around as-a-service offerings to provide greater flexibility, reliability, and improved performance as well as reduce costs and free up internal resources.

Quocirca has released its latest cloud print services report, featuring Y Soft, and revealing the current state of cloud-based printing.

According to the report, cloud print services are emerging as a way of minimising the cost and improving the efficiency of operating an on-premise print infrastructure. Reducing or eliminating reliance on local print servers, along with shifting print management to the cloud, lets businesses move from a capex to an opex model. Flexible and scalable subscription-based pricing provides lower and more predictable costs, while IT burden is reduced as tasks are managed by a third-party cloud print services provider. 

Key findings from the report include:

• The traditional on-premise print infrastructure is complex and characterised by cost inefficiencies
• Cloud print services and solutions overcome on-premise challenges and represent an opportunity to reduce costs (both financial and environmental), lower the IT burden and improve security

• Almost three-quarters of organisations expect to adopt cloud print management by 2025, and many are adopting a multi-cloud strategy

Adam O’Neill, Managing Director Australia and New Zealand, Y Soft said, “in addition to on-premise cost inefficiencies, on-premise infrastructure is complex, requiring a lot of IT resources. With cloud-based printing, organisations’ resources could be deployed to work on more strategic initiatives to improve business processes and operations rather than managing print infrastructure. However, not all organisations are ready to jump straight into public cloud hosting for print services regardless of the benefits. There are ways to take the journey to public cloud in a series of steps. For example, if an organisation is on-premise, it may want to transition to partial on-premise and partial private cloud. Or, it may want to go from on-premise to all-in on a private cloud. The main thing is that organisations should understand where they are, where they want to go, and how best to get there.”