Components & Peripherals News
10 Top Printer Industry Trends To Watch In 2021
Kyle Alspach
While this year is likely to see an increase in office printing, opportunities around serving work-from-home print needs are expected to continue.
Focus On Security
For companies that are seeking to enable a “true business environment” for workers in the home, business-level printer capabilities are a must-have—including around security, Kmetz said. “The home is not a bastion of security,” he said. “If you want to hack somebody’s work environment, it became a lot easier now with people working from home.”
And print is one of the often-overlooked areas of security—though that’s starting to change, Larkin said. At MARCO, “probably our fastest-growing category today is security. And we have a chief information security officer with a security team—and part of that team is dedicated exclusively to our print side,” Larkin said. “People don’t really think about printers as a security risk, but it’s one of the easiest backdoors for hackers.”
The solution provider has been performing security assessments for customers in part as a way to re-engage with existing customers--including by identifying older printers that present security risks and offering recommendations to address the issues, he said. “It’s an endpoint on their network that needs to be treated as such,” Larkin said. And that has only become more crucial with so many people working from home, he said. “It’s about, how do we provide the same level of service to them that we’re providing within our own walls?”
