HP M630
Portfolio of products and services designed to offer same level of security to printers as seen in personal computers and servers.
Financial Post reported on the potential printers have to act as a “hacker’s gateway” to a computer network, and that as a result, HP has announced a portfolio of products and services to ensure that printers have the same level of protection as personal computers and servers.
The article notes that printers and MFDs are “often neglected in corporate security features”, with Ed Wingate, Vice President of Solutions, HP LaserJet and Enterprise Solutions, explaining that despite this, “they and other embedded devices are frequently a gateway to the network for hackers” but applying the same level of security to them as computers and servers has been “historically difficult”.
In a survey by Quocirca, 90 percent of respondents reportedly indicated that they have had some form of security breach through printing; whether it was simply a confidential document being left in a printer’s output tray, or a print job being sent to the wrong device.
Michael Howard, Worldwide Security Practice Lead for LaserJet and Enterprise Solutions at HP, highlighted the need to recognise that “these are not your parent’s printers […] they are not just terminals hanging off a PC”, rather, they may contain hard drives holding sensitive data that is “often unencrypted”. However, he noted that the hard disks in HP’s LaserJet portfolio “have been encrypted since 2008”, with encryption becoming “standard in 2010” and tools offered by the OEM to “retrofit older models”.
HP’s new products and services, which The Recycler previously reported on, come as part of the company’s new branding for its printing offerings, HP JetAdvantage, which “encompasses not only security, but all facets if document workflow and printing”. The portfolio includes the LaserJet Enterprise Flow MFP M630, which has print speeds of 60ppm, an encrypted hard drive and the ability to “send encrypted email and generate encrypted PDF files”. The device is available in Canada this autumn at a price of CA$3,149 (US$2,870/€2,220).
Two further devices announced are part of the LaserJet Pro series – the M201 and M225 – priced as CA$229 (US$209/€161) and CA$329 (US$300/€232) respectively. Both devices are monochrome and compatible with HP’s Imaging and Printing Security Center (IPSC), with the M201 being a “basic” LaserJet printer designed for “telecommuters or remote offices”; while the M225 is an MFC.
Meanwhile, HP’s JetAdvantage Pull Print software will be released in North America on 5 November, bringing “security advantages larger enterprises have enjoyed to small and medium businesses”. Users will be able to use a cloud-based service to print via the HP cloud as well as retrieve documents from “the printer of their choice” after entering their credentials and selecting the job from “a personalised encrypted print queue”. Documents are automatically erased if they are held for over three days and haven’t been deleted manually to ensure that they remain secure.
HP Secure Content Management and Monitoring, meanwhile, will be released in February 2015 as an extension of HP Autonomy Information Governance tools, and will “monitor and audit all information flowing through an HP MFC” by detecting confidential information such as credit card numbers in documents and “flagging it for administrator attention”.