There is no doubt about it; businesses are taking the technological leap towards cloud services – and it is happening fast! In fact, the global market for cloud services is expected to triple between 2016 and 2020, according to forecasts made by both Gartner and 451Research. Furthermore, a survey made by BDO in the US reveals that 74 per cent of all CEOs expect cloud computing to be the most measurable impact factor on their business in 2017.
And there is a good reason for this!
Plug-and-play cloud print services
Print infrastructure is both costly and hard to maintain. Therefore, after having moved basic IT applications and infrastructure to the cloud, the next natural step is to include print in your Software as a Service (SaaS) portfolio.
The move towards cloud printing is primarily driven by the overall organizational benefits of SaaS – it saves time, resources and has the flexibility to fit changing business needs. However, it is also driven by demand from Business decision-makers who adopt their consumer habits and require immediate time to solution for their business challenges instead of waiting for IT to supply them with a solution. This change of behavior and demands are driving cloud service adoptions like Office 365, Salesforce and Dropbox. They expect the same flexibility all their workplace tools. They want plug-and-play solutions for their cloud print services.
Finding the right cloud print service
But first things first! Print solutions branded and sold as cloud or SaaSsolutions have widely different approaches to cloud technology. It is important to know the difference in order to find the right solution for your organization as the technologies behind can have very different implications on your business. For instance, some cloud services are only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, where driver-management and software maintenance remain heavy burdens.
ABOUT SAAS CLOUD PRINTING
SaaS is a software licensing and delivery model in which IT infrastructure and software is centrally hosted and licensed on a subscription basis. With SaaS cloud printing, the organization’s print environment is managed in the cloud and server infrastructure can be eliminated, while actual print jobs never need to leave the internal network.
