Last week, we discussed how 90% of your printing costs go towards document management, end-user time, admin and IT support. This week, we are focusing in on one of these areas that are the biggest drain on a business: security.

On average, a company loses 5% of its revenue to fraud. These losses not only affect the bottom line, but also incur compliance fines, customer service cost and churn, and brand and reputation damage - and reputation is not something that can be bought back once it is lost.

The problem is that existing security systems are not evolving at the pace of sophisticated cyber criminals. Unlike many at senior management and board level, criminals do not consider security issues to be taboo, rather exploiting business leaders’ reluctance to address fraud effectively.

Endpoint security used to be all a CIO had to worry about, but with business going mobile, anything online is vulnerable to theft or attack. Firewalls stop the criminals from getting into the system, but don’t take into account risky employee behaviour.

PC and network security are a good start, but few companies understand the threat of ineffective printer security. Printers now have many of the same components as a PCs do (Hard-Drive, Network Card, BIOS, Internet Access) yet printer security is seen as a non-issue. Risks on print security, caused by a loose print policy, run in the spectrum from confidential prints left on printers to hackers accessing printer hard drives.

Just as a mobile workforce is reducing silos within company departments, business processes must be considered as a whole, instead of as separate systems. Any information that enters, is processed and leaves a business as an asset that can be hacked, stolen or exploited.

Considerations such as Document management cloud storage vs off-site back-up and storage, outsourced data recovery, automated rules-based access control, intelligent printer malware detection, print user authentication and a ‘pull print’ policy, all go a long way to securing your business.

AYOH disrupts the status quo by looking at your actual business processes, and not a hypothetical idea created by an office automation company far removed from your lived experience. We look at all of the vulnerable security points that your business information passes through, whether a physical firewall, or flash disk in the pocket of an employee, and build a security solution that mitigates risk as much as possible.

Our global partners are leaders in security with HP Inc being ranked Number 1 by IDC for Print and Document security solutions and services worldwide and DocuWare being certified ISO27001 and GDPR compliant.

Disrupt the status quo; break the taboo, and take security as seriously as we do.

AYOH can help you with that:

Michael Diederiks: 083 775 9965 • michael@ayoh.co.za

Ross Rencken: 082 802 2235 • ross@ayoh.co.za