The MPS Industry and Cyber Security: How Can They Work Together Harmoniously?

But did you know that data breaches can often occur from your multi-function devices?

Successfully getting the managed print service industry and those in cyber security to work together seamlessly can often be challenging. Due to a large number of attack vectors, as well as copious amounts of data to analyse, getting the right insights into how secure your managed print devices are can be difficult.

According to recent research by Verizon, preventing one kind of security attack is not adequate, as attackers often use a variety of techniques during their campaigns. It is estimated that around 62% of attacks are linked to hacking, with 51% making use of malware and 43% making use of social media to deploy attacks. Interestingly, 14% of attacks were deemed to be the result of employee mistakes which often led to holes in security that were exploited. Multi-function devices and printers are often overlooked when it comes to cyber security.

Threat response teams need to run queries on all managed print devices, often in real-time, when a suspicious threat is found and run those queries against large streaming and historical data sets to check the extent of a possible data breach through those devices. This detailed analysis should confirm the threat, flag it up as requiring more investigation, or discount it.  If both those in the MPS industry and the cyber security industry can find proactive and productive ways to work together, the security threats posed by multi-function devices will be substantially reduced.

The issues around the managed print service industry and cyber security working together are not insurmountable. Enterprises might consider cloud-based print solutions to get over some of these challenges.  The use of AI is another area that the managed print service industry is leaning on along with machine learning to prioritise security alerts and automate responses to significantly reduce the stress placed on security teams. Machine learning models can be trained to identify unusual behaviour patterns that may not be picked up by pre-set security rules, and security teams who are looking to make use of AI and machine learning need to invest heavily in data science applications and skillsets.

The ultimate aim is to make it easier for those in the managed print service industry and cyber security professionals to collaborate in a centralised environment to improve speed-to-insight and processes. Only by working together in this way can these challenges be solved successfully.