Understanding the two meanings to “secure printing.”
Not only am I living on each side of the pond for a couple of months at a time every year, I also work on both sides of the printing industry: office imaging and digital (transactional/production) printing. This means, naturally, I’m used to how Brits use certain words, and how Americans sometimes get different messages across using the same words. You get used to it and learn to consider the source—either what you’re reading or by the accent of the person you’re having a conversation with.
So far, the tech lingo of the printing industry has been quite clear. The office imaging industry talks about itself in its own language; the digital printing industry, as in high-speed laser or inkjet, also has its very own language. At least, that’s what I thought until I stumbled upon a couple of articles about secure printing.
Secure print, secure printing….Of course, I was ready to assume (yes, you may read between the letters of “assume” to imagine how I felt about it after digging into the details) that no matter where you roam in the world of printing, these words mean the same thing. Protect your documents, as in the sensitive content they contain mainly at the output stage, by having to identify yourself at the selected output device. Simple.
We know, whether in Europe or the U.S., what secure print/printing is, and that it should be part of any decent managed print services program. All OEMs and many dealerships offer, or have partnered to offer, suitable solutions in this vein. The more advanced meaning of secure print/printing also reflects the network environment and how a printer is secured to avoid breaches from the outside. Done deal, end of the article…almost.
The first time I realized there are two meanings of secure printing was earlier this year when a headline in Printingnews.com caught my eye: “Secure Printing is an Industry-Wide Challenge.” No, it had nothing to do with the MPS secure printing we all know. It was about what the production printing industry can do to fight counterfeits, forgery, and, of course, hacking.
Let’s start with hacking, as this is pretty basic and the closest to MPS initiatives: protect your environment and above all, protect your devices and print jobs from being hacked. Thinking about the verticals that could be affected—government, healthcare, insurance, finance, all of which are transactional printing—it is quite obvious why security is on the top of the list (and, as a side note, also why there’s still very little cloud printing around in production printing; too much traffic with the outside world isn’t too healthy when everything printed is about personal details).
Another obvious issue is counterfeiting, with the most prominent object here being money, as in banknotes. We certainly want that printing process to be governed by a secure printing policy and complementary technology, not just by a group of armed guards protecting the printing facility.
And lastly, anything else you can print that, if falsified, would pose a threat to the brand (reputation across to revenue) and user (usability across to health and safety). We could be looking at something as simple as cosmetics packaging (remember that super cheap luxury-label perfume you were offered on the beach? It looked real, but when you opened it, it most certainly didn’t smell real!), or something as dangerous as medical/chemical packaging with the wrong information, date, almost everything falsified—it all could be lethal.
Over the years, as laser and inkjet printers increasingly has taken over the production printing environment, several OEMs have developed, and sometimes partnered to develop, technology to add an additional level of security to the output they empower, taking advantage of ink-technologies (UV, variable heights, etc.), adding “secret” information invisible to the human eye, such as holograms, AR, and much more.
As 2D and 3D printing take over more and more parts of our lives, security should be at the heart of every printing process, from creation to print to delivery.
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