Printer Fleet Management

If you’re experiencing issues with your printer or you’re in the market for a new one, you might already feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and price ranges out there. A quick search can show printers priced anywhere from under $100 to well over $100,000, all claiming to be the “perfect solution.”

Now, the simplest option would be to go to your nearest retail store…say Walmart, Office Depot, or even Amazon, and pick up a new printer on the cheap.

Easy, quick, and problem solved… right?

Well, it depends.

If you’re a home user or someone who prints occasionally, a retail printer can absolutely be the right choice. But if you’re a business or organization that relies on printing to keep things running, that initial convenience comes with a cost you don’t see until later. And by “later,” we usually mean after the return window has closed.

Have you ever had a printer mysteriously “act up” after someone changed a setting or discovered a security feature turned off without anyone knowing? Misconfigurations are one of the most common causes of security vulnerabilities in office technology. Something as simple as an incorrect setting can lead to a cybersecurity incident.

Printers are no exception; in fact, they’re some of the most vulnerable devices. It’s easy for settings to get tweaked, features to get disabled, and security gaps to quietly open. Most teams don’t realize anything happened until IT is troubleshooting or a risk assessment reveals an exposure.

This is where Xerox’s Configuration Watchdog becomes a powerful safety net for organizations that rely on secure, well-managed print environments.

Before we get into the details, the goal of this blog is simple:

If you walk into a growing business and see a different printer in every corner, with some new and some barely hanging on, you can usually guess what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s a situation where the print environment is managing the business, not the other way around.

And here’s a stat worth considering as you think about your office: organizations can waste up to 3% of their annual budget on unnecessary printing expenses. If your business doesn’t “own” the print environment, it can hurt your bottom line.

As businesses scale past 15+ devices, this problem will only get worse. A badly managed print environment can lead to costs rising, downtime becoming normal, IT getting buried in random printer tickets, and leadership starting to wonder, “Is this really the best we can do?”

What would happen if your office network went dark tomorrow? You would have no access to files stored in cloud, no way to email clients, and no printers to push through time-sensitive documents. For too many businesses, this is a reality. In fact, nearly six in ten companies report that cybersecurity incidents caused moderate to severe disruption in the past year.

And cyber threats don’t just affect big corporations. Small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly targeted because attackers know resources are limited and defenses are often patchy. With remote work, mobile devices, and cloud platforms expanding the “attack surface,” it’s easier than ever for hackers to find an entry point.

If you’re running a large business, chances are your copier and printer fleet feels a little more like a chaotic traffic jam than a well-orchestrated system. You might have multiple devices across multiple floors or even multiple states, which means IT is constantly fielding supply requests, service calls, and error messages. And let’s be honest, nobody wants their CIO spending Monday morning hunting down why “Printer 12B” is flashing a cryptic error code again.

As a print vendor, we’ve been helping organizations of all sizes tame their printer fleets for over 35 years. As an authorized Xerox partner, we specialize in making large fleets run smoothly, securely, and cost-effectively.

In this guide, we’ll walk through practical steps you can take to optimize your printer fleet—whether that means trimming excess devices, streamlining supplies, or tightening up security.

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