Your CFO wants to know why IT operating costs keep going up.

You pull the reports. Software licensing is stable. Cloud infrastructure spend is predictable. Hardware refresh cycles look reasonable. Then one line item stands out: print infrastructure support.

At first glance, it doesn’t make sense. The printers were purchased years ago. Most are fully depreciated. Yet the ongoing cost tied to printing continues to climb. When you start tracing where that money goes, the answer becomes clearer.

Print servers need constant attention. Driver updates create compatibility issues across operating systems. Security patches vary by device model and firmware version. Help desk tickets tied to printing never seem to drop, even after upgrades. None of this appears in the printer purchase budget, but it all lands squarely on IT.

For Canadian IT departments, this creates a familiar tension. Leadership expects costs to fall as systems modernize. Employees expect printing to work wherever they happen to be working. Traditional print infrastructure struggles to deliver either outcome.

Cloud print solutions are often positioned as the fix. But the real value isn’t in the promise alone. It’s in how they reduce specific, recurring sources of cost and complexity that many organizations have simply learned to tolerate.

The Infrastructure Burden That Rarely Gets Counted

Print infrastructure costs don't sit neatly in one place. They spread quietly across systems, teams, and budgets. But those line items aren't where the real expense lives.

The larger cost often hides in time. Ask your team to track every printer-related task for a month. Driver installations, printer mappings, VPN issues, firmware updates, and help desk tickets.

What felt like background noise turns out to be a steady drain on capacity. Print-related support often consumes several times more time than organizations expect.

Hybrid work has made this worse. Print environments were built for centralized offices with predictable network paths. Today's distributed work patterns require different infrastructure approaches.

Today, employees print from home offices, client sites, shared spaces, and temporary locations. Each scenario introduces new variables. VPN printing generates tickets. Mobile printing behaves inconsistently. Guest access creates security concerns that are hard to standardize.

Research from Gartner consistently shows that organizations investing in flexible workplace technologies see better cost and productivity outcomes than those maintaining rigid, location-bound infrastructure. Printing, however, is often left behind in that shift to flexible infrastructure.

What Cloud Printing Actually Changes

Cloud print solutions don’t just move printing to a different location. They change how print jobs are managed entirely.

Rather than using on-premises print servers, users authenticate via a centralized service, send jobs to a cloud queue, and securely release documents at any connected device. The routing, authentication, and management happen outside your local infrastructure.

That shift has practical consequences.

First, print servers are removed from your environment. There's no hardware to maintain, patch, monitor, or back up.

Capacity planning disappears. Spooler services stop being a point of failure. An entire category of infrastructure drops off your responsibility list.

Driver management also changes. Cloud print platforms like KYOCERA Cloud Print and Scan (KCPS) rely on universal or lightweight drivers that work across device types and operating systems.

IT teams no longer test and deploy model-specific drivers for every printer. Compatibility issues still exist, but they occur far less often and are easier to resolve.

Help desk demand declines because there are fewer things to break. Printing no longer depends on network paths back to internal servers. Authentication happens consistently through the cloud service. Users print and release jobs the same way whether they are in the office or remote.

Security becomes more centralized as well. Instead of managing policies device by device, authentication and access controls are applied once. Audit logs come from a single system. Compliance reporting stops requiring data from multiple sources.

Organizations that move print management to the cloud typically see a sharp drop in print-related support demands as print servers, driver management, and security maintenance are eliminated. That recovered capacity doesn’t disappear. It gets redirected to work that moves the business forward.

Understanding Cloud Print Security

Any discussion about cloud services raises security questions, and printing is no exception. Print jobs often contain sensitive information, which makes IT teams understandably cautious.

Traditional print environments offer direct control, but that control comes with ongoing responsibility. Every printer requires firmware updates, encryption settings, access controls, and monitoring. Maintaining consistency across a diverse fleet is difficult, especially as environments grow.

Cloud print services centralize those controls. Documents are encrypted in transit and at rest. Authentication integrates with existing identity providers. Security updates are applied automatically.

Canadian organizations can reference guidance from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security when evaluating whether cloud services meet their security and compliance obligations.

Consistency is where cloud printing often delivers its biggest security improvement. When every print job follows the same secure path, gaps created by device-specific configurations are reduced. These protections apply uniformly, regardless of location or printer model.

Looking Beyond the Subscription Cost

Cloud print solutions are typically priced per user or per device. That recurring fee is easy to spot, and leadership will ask whether IT is adding an added cost rather than reducing one.

The answer depends on how complete the comparison is.

Traditional print infrastructure carries costs that are rarely attributed directly to printing. Server hardware and maintenance. Operating system licenses. Backup and disaster recovery processes. Driver testing. Security patching. Ongoing help desk support.

When Canadian organizations account for IT labour accurately, cloud print subscriptions frequently cost less than maintaining traditional infrastructure. Many see break-even points within six to twelve months, with faster returns in environments that support large remote or mobile workforces.

Predictability matters as well. Cloud subscriptions create stable operating expenses while traditional infrastructure produces irregular spikes.

Implementing Without Creating Disruption

Printing is one of those systems users expect to work without thinking about it. Any disruption is noticed immediately. That makes implementation strategy critical.

Many organizations start with remote and mobile employees. These users benefit most from cloud printing and often rely least on existing office-based infrastructure.

At KYOCERA Document Solutions, phased implementations are common. Organizations often begin with departments that generate the highest volume of print-related support tickets.

Running traditional and cloud environments in parallel during transition periods also helps. Existing systems remain available while users adopt the new model.

Training the help desk early is essential. Support teams need clarity on which users are on which system and how issues should be handled.

From a technical standpoint, integration is usually straightforward. Cloud print platforms connect with existing identity providers. You aren't replacing everything at once.