The market researcher, part of Keypoint Intelligence, has completed its study, Office Document Technology Security, and introduced a scorecard.
The study looks at multiple clients’ “best practices” for security in the IT sector and at how many of the “most security-conscious industries are implementing these security controls” in relation to PCs, mobile devices, printers, and MFPs, “as well as understand the security strengths and capabilities of the print and MFP manufacturers”.
The evolvement of technology security has shown “tighter controls” on hardware and networks, as well as the document, but businesses are not showing the same attentiveness to office equipment technology. For a better understanding of how “the most secure” businesses “prioritise security” an online survey was conducted, and 191 people took part from companies in healthcare, financial services and government as well as focussing on how printer and MFP OEMs address security in their devices and what their security solutions and services offer.
Each OEM completed a security questionnaire that had 141 criteria for security information, which culminated in assessing how well suppliers “provide security solutions to the industry”, and were divided into eight sections “from which a rigorous scoring method was applied to grade the vendor’s abilities against the overall industry”.
Rand Dazo, Group Director of Office Advisory Services at InfoTrends, said: “The office document technology industry still has a way to go to convince even the most secure industries that printer and MFP security is as much of a threat as other network endpoints, such as desktop computers or PCs. According to our survey, organisations were more likely to secure their PC environments 25 percent to 100 percent more than their counterpart print and MFP areas.”