If your business has shifted to hybrid work, even partially, you’ve probably already sorted out video calls, file sharing, and team communication. But there’s one piece of infrastructure that often gets left behind: printing.
That might not sound like a big deal, but for many small and medium-sized businesses, it causes more headaches than you’d expect. This article breaks down why traditional printing setups don’t work well for hybrid teams, and how cloud printing can fix that without a lot of complexity or cost.
Hybrid Work Is the New Normal, But Printing Hasn’t Caught Up
Hybrid work isn’t a temporary phase. According to Gallup, hybrid employees now have the highest engagement rates of any work arrangement: 35%, compared to 27% for full-time in-office workers. And smaller businesses are actually leading the charge. Research from the Flex Index shows that companies with 500 or fewer employees are the most likely to offer fully flexible working arrangements.
The problem is that most print infrastructure was built for a world where everyone sat in the same office every day. Printers were connected to on-site servers. IT teams mapped devices by desk location. Drivers were installed manually on company machines.
When your team is split across home offices, shared desks, and different locations, that model quickly falls apart. Remote employees can’t reach office printers without a VPN. VPNs drop. Drivers fail. Print-related IT tickets pile up. And sensitive documents get printed and left unattended in trays where anyone can walk past them.
What Is Cloud Printing, Exactly?
Cloud printing is often confused with wireless printing, but it’s actually something more substantial. Rather than routing print jobs through a local server in your office, a cloud print platform handles everything through a secure, internet-based system.
In practice, this means:
Your employees can send a print job from any authorized device, whether at home, at the office, or on the road. The job sits securely in a queue until they’re physically at the printer and ready to release it. No local network required, no VPN headaches, no fiddling with drivers.
Most cloud print platforms also plug into identity systems your business already uses, like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Access is tied to user accounts, which means permissions are easy to manage and removing a departing employee’s print access is as simple as disabling their account.
The Security Risk You Might Be Overlooking
Here’s a statistic worth pausing on: according to Quocirca’s 2024 Print Security Landscape report, 67% of businesses experienced at least one print-related data breach in the past year, up from 61% the year before. The average cost of each breach rose 38% year-on-year, reaching over $1.3 million USD.
For SMBs, the numbers are even more sobering. Only 13% of small and medium-sized businesses say they’re fully confident in the security of their print infrastructure.
Hybrid work makes this worse. When employees print from home networks on personal or shared devices, visibility drops. Documents get left in output trays. Print jobs travel across networks without encryption. It’s a vulnerability that’s easy to overlook because printers don’t feel like a cybersecurity issue, but they very much are.
Cloud printing addresses this in a few key ways:
- Secure print release: Documents only print when the user authenticates at the device, so nothing sits in a tray waiting to be picked up by the wrong person.
- Encrypted transmission: Print jobs are encrypted while in transit, reducing the risk of interception.
- Activity logging: You get a full record of who printed what and when, useful for audits and compliance.
These aren’t just nice-to-haves for larger organizations. For sectors like healthcare, legal, finance, education, or any business handling sensitive client information, they’re essential.
Less Work for Your IT Team (or You)
For many SMBs, “IT” is one person wearing several hats, or a small external provider. Either way, time spent troubleshooting printing issues is time not spent on things that actually move the business forward.
Traditional print environments require ongoing maintenance: server updates, driver deployments, reconfiguring devices when staff move around or offices change. If you’re running a hot-desking model or have staff working from multiple locations, managing this manually is a real drain.
Cloud printing removes most of that overhead. There’s no local print server to maintain. New users can be given access automatically through your existing identity system. New devices at a new location can be configured centrally without anyone needing to visit the site. When someone leaves the company, their access is revoked instantly.
The result is fewer support calls about printing, and a simpler, more consistent setup across wherever your team happens to be working.
Better Visibility Into What You’re Actually Spending
When employees print from different locations on different devices, print costs become hard to track. You might be paying for high-volume printers that go underused in one location, while another office is quietly racking up color prints that nobody’s monitoring.
Cloud print platforms give you centralized reporting across all your locations and users. You can see usage patterns by team, by device, or by individual. That makes it much easier to spot waste, like color printing being used for internal documents that don’t need it, and set sensible defaults like double-sided printing.
For growing businesses, it also makes budgeting easier. You know what you’re spending on print, and you can plan accordingly.
It Scales With Your Business
One of the practical advantages of cloud printing for smaller businesses is how well it handles change. Adding new staff, opening a new location, or shifting to a more flexible working model doesn’t require a major infrastructure project. New users get access through the same identity system. New printers can be configured remotely.
If your business is growing, or if your team’s working patterns are still evolving, that kind of flexibility is genuinely useful.
Is It Right for Your Business?
Cloud printing isn’t for everyone. If your whole team works in one office and printing is already working well, there may not be a compelling case to change anything.
But if any of the following sound familiar, it’s probably worth a closer look:
- Your staff work from home, multiple offices, or both
- You’re spending time troubleshooting print-related IT issues
- You handle sensitive client or business documents
- You’re reducing on-site infrastructure or moving more systems to the cloud
- You want clearer visibility into what printing is actually costing you
The Bottom Line
Hybrid work has changed how businesses run, and infrastructure that was built for a centralized office often doesn’t hold up. Cloud printing is one of those practical upgrades that tends to fly under the radar until someone asks why the IT inbox is full of printer complaints, or why a sensitive document was found sitting in an output tray.
It’s not a complicated change, and for most businesses it doesn’t require replacing existing hardware. It’s simply a smarter way to manage print in a world where your team isn’t always in the same room.
About United Business Systems
United Business Systems specializes in simplifying the complexity and management of office technology solutions for over 7,800 organizations nationwide. Services include Managed Print, Document Management and IT Services. Products include MFPs, Copiers, Printers and Wide Format Printers. UBS’s headquarters is in Fairfield, NJ with branch offices in Moorestown, NJ, Manasquan, NJ and New York.For the latest industry trends and technology insights visit UBS’ main Blog page.
