HP M630
Last week HP unveiled a variety of printing services and solutions aimed at helping customers simplify printer security deployment and monitoring to better protect their network and confidential information while meeting expanding compliance guidelines.
Prior to the announcement I received a pre-launch preview from David Laing, director of innovation, HP LaserJet & Enterprise Solutions.
This focus on security is a shift for HP who has been primarily focused on mobility of late. “What you’re going to see his fall is a big focus on security,” says Laing. “We’re recognizing there are more sophisticated security threats out there and we’re also recognizing that not everyone in the industry is aware of where and what the vulnerabilities are on a printer or MFP. Our goal is to educate them and provide them with the tools and services to secure their fleets and protect their networks.”
The new security services and solutions are part of HP JetAdvantage, a new brand in HP’s document and workflow printing portfolio. HP JetAdvantage encompasses solutions for mobile printing, print security, workflow, and printer management.
They include:
- The HP Imaging and Printing Security Center (IPSC) 2.1, a tool that simplifies security deployment and monitoring for HP printing fleets by streamlining the creation of IT security policies for secure device communications. According to HP, IPSC reduces network security risks and improves compliance without adding to IT overhead.
- HP Print Security Advisory Services, which provides an analysis of a print environment, deployment of optimal security policies, and recommendations for solutions to best secure the printing infrastructure.
- HP LaserJet Enterprise flow multifunction printer M630 series, which is bundled with a suite of more than 200 embedded security features, document workflows for compliance, and the HP Trusted Platform Module Accessory that provides customers with protection “out of the box.”
“The focus is on fleet security,” says Laing. “Most customers have no idea that an MFP has up to 200 security settings on it. We’ve created a tool (HP Imaging and Printing Security Center) that simplifies securing your fleet of devices.”
The module asks users a set of questions that determines the security policy of the user’s fleet. “Anyone involved in PC security can answer those questions or they can choose from preset policies created by HP,” explains Laing.
And with one click, the user can secure an entire fleet. As new devices are added to network, the tool discovers them and ensures they comply with company policy. It also manages security certificates on printers. “It’s something most companies do for their PCs, but not for their printers,” acknowledges Laing.
Rounding out the HP print security portfolio are additional solutions and enhancements that help customers monitor, audit, and manage a print environment. One enhancement includes extending the security monitoring capability of HP ArcSight to include security monitoring of the entire HP portfolio of FutureSmart printing and MFPs. This allows for collecting, analyzing, and correlating print device log events and automatically highlighting risks in the HP ArcSight dashboard to provide customers with a comprehensive view of their IT environment security. “This gives a security manager a complete view of all the PCs and servers and the peripheral printers and MFPs as well,” notes Laing.
The HP Secure Content Management and Monitoring solution helps customers reduce the risk of security breaches associated with print, scan, copy and fax functions at the device level. By extending HP Autonomy Information Governance tools to monitor and audit all information flowing through the HP multifunction device, this solution enables early detection of document security breaches.
HP JetAdvantage Pull Print—available with select HP LaserJet and Officejet products—helps prevent unauthorized access to confidential print jobs and reduces waste that can occur from unclaimed or misprinted jobs. Each print job is securely stored in the cloud using AES 256-bit encryption until the user authenticates and claims the job from the printer. According to HP, this cloud-based solution offers simple setup and management, taking the complexity out of pull print for enterprises and SMBs.
“With this new solution our devices will ship with pull printing capability, and we will offer upgrades for installed devices going back to 2004 that will enable them to take advantage of this capability as well,” adds Laing. “This is great for customers who wanted to invest in pull printing, but didn’t want to spend the money or resellers who wanted to offer it but didn’t want to invest in service techs. We’ve made pull printing a simple solution because it’s a cloud-based SaaS application delivered by HP.”
Laing adds that this is the first of HP’s JetAdvantage on demand cloud-based solutions that HP will be coming out with during the next couple of years.
Summing up the announcement, Laing concludes, “We’ve got cost, monitoring compliance, end-to-end data protection, services, and solutions to help our customers take control and manage their fleets of printers like they manage their fleets of PCs.”
Additional information about these new HP imaging and printing offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/printsecurity.
