Print.IT Reseller- issue 95

choose from public cloud, on-premise private cloud, or a combination of both. The infrastructure can scale up or down and seamlessly integrate with existing architectures. This makes businesses and IT departments more agile. Additionally, many believe that migrating to cloud has to take a long time. For some solutions, that’s true – for others, absolutely not. Moving your print to a cloud environment can be done in just ten minutes with HCP.” www.everyoneprint.com Craig Pratt, Regional Sales Director, CMYK Digital: “CMYK is a managed IT and cloud services provider and has been for many years. We have been driving clients to adopt cloud services for some time and its very much business as usual for our teams. “The benefits of cloud adoption can easily become the barriers, for example quick deployment, zero upfront costs, investment in hardware, these are all great benefits financially, but this shouldn’t be seen as the driver to adopt a cloud working environment. For some clients this can be a substantial culture change within their business, moving business critical data from a perceived physical location to the cloud. This change takes an amount of consultancy, ‘hand holding’ and scoping to ensure the rollout is done correctly and efficiently. “The migration is absolutely key to successful end-user adoption – this takes a degree of time to scope and deploy. Rolling a service out fast doesn’t naturally put your organisation in a better position, it needs structure, security, usability, accessibility to ensure it’s well received by end-users and manageable moving forward. That’s how our offering is different, we consult, we guide, and we add value – as a Microsoft Certified Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and a SaaS specialist with many other vendors we need to ensure the benefits don’t become the barriers. COVID as we know had a great deal of influence on organisations’ mind-sets around cloud adoption, mainly because organisations had no other option but to adopt cloud technologies to ensure they could continue to operate effectively.” www.cmyk-digital.co.uk James Overton, Director, SOS Systems: “If you go back maybe five years or so, some of the businesses we were engaging with had reservations around the location of datacentres, the security in general of their data, and levels of encryption. There were also far more instances of outages than there are now. Therefore, generally we aren’t seeing a massive resistance to cloud adoption, as most companies seem to be moving towards it. I would say that public sector bodies and secure government facilities however are sometimes reluctant to use cloud and I am not sure that will ever change.” www.sossystems.co.uk Stuart Mabe, Service Delivery Manager, Brother UK: “There’s some inertia in the market over cloud migration of print infrastructure as businesses’ IT leads have been pulled in all directions over the last two years. Due to these disruptions, they have had to prioritise other projects, such as rolling out and monitoring remote working technology. “However, we know that enhancing security, boosting productivity, and achieving cost-efficiencies are key goals in business IT. So, there’s work to be done in the sector to boost understanding of cloud migration in print as an effective solution to these goals – giving IT leads with less mature cloud strategies better reason to lift it up their list of priorities. “For example, cloud solutions remove the need to store and license on-premise servers in order to run printers, which costs customers almost £4,000 a year, according to Gartner. “Cloud solutions also enhance the security of the documents themselves, as they enable IT leads to keep track of what documents are being printed, stop I would say that public sector bodies and secure government facilities however are sometimes reluctant to use cloud and I am not sure that will ever change confidential documents being printed and set rules to help further manage print jobs. “A lack of compatibility between different vendors and print management solutions has also presented barriers to cloud adoption. This has historically made it challenging for IT leads running larger print fleets, using machines from different vendors to integrate all devices successfully.” www.brother.co.uk Neil MacDonald, UK & Ireland Channel Director, HP Inc: “Given the wide variance between cloud offerings and the vast spectrum of customer requirements, it’s critical that we always engage technical consultants to understand the customer requirements and fit solutions accordingly. A one-size approach will not fit all. “The package we recommend will come down to the needs of the customer and there are many factors that can influence this, not limited to how the customers’ policies dictate the handling and residency of data and bandwidth usage. In these circumstances, HP SecurePrint is a convenient solution that works with customers to understand requirements alongside IT/data policies, which will inform the print solution put forward. HP SecurePrint can be architected to split control data and print data, keeping the customer documents within the customers’ IT system. Not only PRINTITRESELLER.UK 45 VOX POP James Overton Craig Pratt Neil MacDonald Stuart Mabe

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