Zero Trust Printing: Why Your Print Fleet Is a Cybersecurity Gap
Zero Trust has become the security model UK businesses are expected to move toward — but most Zero Trust strategies have a blind spot the size of a multifunction printer. If your print fleet sits outside your security perimeter, your Zero Trust architecture isn't really Zero Trust at all.
This guide explains what Zero Trust means in practice, why printers are one of the most overlooked endpoints on a business network, and the practical steps any organisation can take to bring its print environment into a Zero Trust framework — without slowing down the business.
What is Zero Trust, in plain terms?
Zero Trust is a cybersecurity model built on a simple idea: trust nothing, verify everything. Where traditional security treats the corporate network as a trusted zone — anything inside the perimeter is broadly trusted, anything outside isn't — Zero Trust treats every device, user and request as potentially hostile until proven otherwise.
The shift matters because the perimeter has effectively dissolved. Hybrid working, cloud applications, BYOD policies and connected devices mean the old model of "inside vs outside" no longer reflects how businesses actually operate. Zero Trust replaces it with continuous verification at every step.
Adoption is moving quickly. Microsoft's most recent Zero Trust research found that 96% of security decision-makers consider Zero Trust critical to their organisation's success, with 76% already implementing some form of Zero Trust security. For UK businesses, the question is no longer whether to move toward Zero Trust — it's how to extend it across every part of the network, including the parts that have been quietly ignored.
Frameworks like the UK National Cyber Security Centre's Zero Trust design principles, NIST SP 800-207, and Microsoft's Zero Trust model all build on these three ideas. The detail varies, but the underlying logic doesn't.
Why your printers are a Zero Trust blind spot
When IT teams build a Zero Trust roadmap, they typically focus on user identity, endpoint devices (laptops, phones), cloud applications and network access. Printers are rarely on the list — and that's a problem, because a modern multifunction printer is functionally a networked computer with a hard drive, an operating system, network connectivity, and access to documents that are often more sensitive than the data on a typical user's laptop.
Consider what passes through a single office MFP in a typical week: payroll documents, HR letters, contracts, board papers, financial reports, customer data, signed agreements. All of it sits temporarily on the device, often in plain text, and is transmitted across the network to and from user devices, file servers and cloud destinations.
Most MFPs have an internal hard drive that retains print, scan and fax data. If the device is decommissioned without proper data wiping, that information walks out of the building.
Printers sit on the same network as your servers and workstations. A compromised printer can be used as a foothold to scan, attack or pivot to higher-value targets.
Many printers are deployed with default admin passwords that are never changed. An attacker on the network can often access the device's admin console without effort.
Printed documents left in output trays are one of the most common — and most underestimated — sources of data leakage in any office.
Printer firmware updates are routinely skipped because no-one owns them. Known vulnerabilities go unpatched for months or years.
Modern MFPs connect directly to cloud services for scan-to-email, scan-to-folder and mobile printing. Those connections need the same scrutiny as any other cloud integration.
Quocirca's annual Print Security Landscape research has consistently found that two thirds of organisations have experienced a print-related data loss in the last 12 months. The average cost of those incidents runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Print is not a low-stakes attack surface.
What Zero Trust looks like applied to your print fleet
Bringing your print environment into a Zero Trust framework doesn't require a rip-and-replace project. It means applying the same three principles — verify explicitly, least-privilege access, assume breach — to the way printing works in your business.
Verify every print job
Documents shouldn't print until the person who sent them has authenticated at the device. Secure print release — sometimes called pull printing or follow-me printing — holds jobs in a secure queue until the user authenticates with a card, PIN or mobile app. This eliminates documents sitting in output trays and makes every print event traceable to a named individual.
Restrict access on a least-privilege basis
Not every user needs to print in colour, scan to email, or send to USB. Print management tools let you set granular policies: who can print what, from which devices, to which destinations, in which volumes. Permissions become an active control, not a default-allow setting.
Treat every device as untrusted
Printers should be on a segmented network — separated from your servers, finance systems and primary file shares. Default admin passwords need to be changed at deployment. Firmware should be patched on a defined schedule. Unused services (FTP, Telnet, legacy print protocols) should be disabled.
Monitor continuously
Every print, scan, copy and admin action should be logged centrally. Anomalies — a sudden surge in scan-to-email volume, an admin login from an unusual location, a user printing volumes that don't match their role — should trigger alerts the same way they would for any other endpoint.
The practical Zero Trust print checklist
If you're starting from scratch, these are the controls every business should have in place — in roughly the order they deliver the most value for the least effort.
Card, PIN or mobile authentication at the device. No anonymous walk-up printing or copying.
Jobs held in a secure queue until released by the authenticated user. No documents sitting in output trays.
Print jobs encrypted in transit between user device and printer, and at rest on the device hard drive.
Full disk encryption enabled on every MFP, with secure data-overwrite at end of life.
Printers on a dedicated VLAN, isolated from primary servers and sensitive systems.
Centrally managed patching schedule across the fleet — not device-by-device.
Role-based rules controlling who can print, scan, copy or email — and to where.
Every job and admin action logged centrally, with retention aligned to your compliance needs.
Where most businesses start: secure print release. It delivers the biggest immediate reduction in risk — eliminating uncollected documents in output trays — and has the highest user-acceptance rate because the experience actually improves. People print to one queue and collect from any device they choose.
Print security and the compliance picture
For UK businesses, Zero Trust isn't just good practice — it increasingly maps onto specific regulatory and certification requirements. Print needs to be inside that scope, not outside it.
| Framework | What it expects from your print environment |
|---|---|
| UK GDPR | Appropriate technical measures to protect personal data — including documents at the printer, in queues, and on device hard drives. Unauthorised disclosure is a reportable incident. |
| Cyber Essentials / Plus | Default passwords changed, unnecessary services disabled, security updates applied promptly, and access controls in place. Printers fall under "network devices" and are in scope. |
| ISO 27001 | Information security controls applied consistently across all assets — including print and document handling. Auditors will ask how you secure devices and document workflows. |
| NCSC Zero Trust principles | All connected devices verified continuously, with policy enforcement at every access point. Multifunction printers are connected devices. |
The recurring theme: there is no compliance framework that lets you exclude printers from scope. They're network endpoints with access to sensitive data, and they're treated that way by every auditor and assessor we've worked with.
Common mistakes when securing print
The patterns we see most often when assessing UK print environments:
- Treating print as facilities, not IT — print procurement is often handled outside the IT and security function. The result is devices on the network without proper security review or ongoing oversight.
- Buying secure devices, then not configuring them securely — most modern MFPs have strong security features built in, but the features are inactive by default. Buying a secure-capable device is not the same as deploying a secure device.
- No-one owns firmware updates — IT assumes the print supplier handles it. The print supplier assumes IT handles it. The reality is that firmware versions across the fleet drift years out of date.
- Decommissioning without data wiping — printers reaching end-of-contract are often returned with hard drives intact, taking years of cached print data with them. This is a significant data protection risk that almost never appears on a risk register.
- Assuming the cloud handles it — moving to cloud print management improves a lot of things, but the device itself still needs hardening. Cloud-managed and secure are not the same thing.
How Zero Trust print works across different network setups
One of the practical questions any IT lead asks is: "Will Zero Trust printing actually work in our network — or do we have to redesign everything first?" The honest answer is that it depends on where your network is on its own Zero Trust journey, and a good print management platform should adapt rather than dictate.
Canon's uniFLOW Online — one of the print management platforms we deploy at Syncro — was designed around exactly this problem. It supports three different network architectures, each aligned to a different stage of Zero Trust maturity. Understanding which one applies to you is a useful exercise regardless of which platform you eventually choose.
The starting point for most small businesses. Workstations, servers and printers all sit on the same network and can communicate freely. This setup doesn't fully satisfy the "assume breach" principle — if one device is compromised, an attacker can move laterally to others — but it's where many businesses still are, and it's not necessarily a barrier to deploying Zero Trust print controls.
The middle ground. PCs and printers are isolated from each other through firewalls or VLANs, so direct communication between user devices and printers is restricted. This is where most mid-sized organisations sit today — security has been tightened, but full micro-segmentation hasn't yet been rolled out.
The most secure architecture, and increasingly the target for organisations with serious compliance requirements. Every endpoint — workstation, printer, server — is isolated from every other endpoint at the network level. The only outbound communication is to the internet. There is no lateral movement possible on the local network. This is the truest expression of "assume breach".
Why this matters: too many print management products force a single network model on the customer. The right approach meets your network where it is today and supports the architecture you'll have in two or three years' time. If your provider can't tell you which of the three tiers your environment matches, that's a useful question to put to them.
How Syncro builds print into your Zero Trust strategy
Most of our clients don't come to us asking for "Zero Trust printing" — they come to us asking how to reduce print costs, simplify their print environment, or pass their next Cyber Essentials audit. The security work happens alongside that, because a properly designed managed print service builds the controls in by default.
Syncro is independent. We work with Canon, Konica Minolta, Epson and Sharp, and our recommendations are shaped by what fits the customer rather than by a manufacturer commitment. That independence matters when the conversation moves from print volumes to security architecture — because not every manufacturer offers the same depth of capability when it comes to Zero Trust.
Why we lead with Canon for security-critical environments
For customers whose print fleet sits inside a serious cybersecurity remit — Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO 27001, regulated industries, or any environment moving toward true Zero Trust — Canon's security proposition is genuinely differentiated:
uniFLOW Online supports all three Zero Trust network architectures. The flat, segmented and micro-segmented models described above aren't a future roadmap — they're supported today, in the same product, with the same user experience. Few competing platforms can credibly claim the same.
Canon imageRUNNER devices are designed around "verify explicitly" by default. Hard drive encryption, secure boot, signed firmware, certificate-based device identity and granular access control are built in rather than bolted on. They're configured at deployment, not at the point a customer asks for them.
Cloud-native architecture removes local infrastructure risk. uniFLOW Online runs serverless from the customer's perspective — no on-premises print server to patch, harden or monitor. For a Zero Trust deployment, removing infrastructure removes attack surface.
For customers whose priorities are different — cost, mono volume, specific workflow requirements — Konica Minolta, Epson or Sharp may be the better recommendation, and we'll say so. Independence works both ways. But on security architecture specifically, Canon's combination of hardware, software and ecosystem maturity is hard to match, and that's why we deploy it where security is the leading concern.
Beyond the technology
Hardware and software only do their job when they're managed properly. Firmware patching, certificate renewal, policy review, decommissioning with verified data wiping — these aren't add-on services. They're part of how a managed print service should run, and they're what separates a properly managed fleet from a collection of devices on a contract.
If you're working toward Cyber Essentials Plus, ISO 27001, or building out a Zero Trust roadmap, a print security review will tell you exactly where your current environment stands, what needs to change, and in what order. We offer this free of charge, with no obligation to switch provider.
Syncro is independent and works with Canon, Konica Minolta, Epson and Sharp. For Zero Trust and security-led deployments specifically, we recommend Canon imageRUNNER hardware combined with uniFLOW Online — the most mature combination on the market for the three Zero Trust network architectures described above.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. The risks aren't proportional to business size — a small business with 30 staff still handles payroll, HR documents and customer data through its print environment, and is just as exposed to ransomware that uses printers as a network foothold. The good news is that the controls scale down well: secure print release, hard drive encryption and proper user authentication are all achievable for any business with a managed print service.
No — and most users find the experience improves. Secure print release means people send to a single queue and pick up from whichever device is convenient, rather than walking to a specific machine and waiting. Authentication takes one to two seconds. Once people are used to it, almost no-one wants to go back.
Not unless your provider has shown you what's in place and how it's being maintained. Ask specifically: what user authentication is enabled, how is firmware patched across the fleet, is data on device hard drives encrypted, and what is the decommissioning process for end-of-life equipment? If the answers aren't clear, the controls probably aren't either — and contract renewal is the right moment to ask better questions of your current provider.
Cloud-based print management — particularly serverless solutions like PaperCut Hive — fits hybrid working better than traditional print servers ever did. Users can print from any location, to any device, with full authentication and audit logging in place. The Zero Trust model actually makes hybrid printing simpler, not harder.
Start with a print security audit. You need to know what devices are on your network, what firmware they're running, what data sits on them, and what access controls exist before you can prioritise improvements. Most businesses are surprised by what an audit reveals — and it costs nothing to commission one through a reputable provider.
Bring your print environment into your Zero Trust strategy
Book a free, no-obligation print security review with Syncro. We'll assess your current fleet, identify the gaps, and show you exactly what a Zero Trust-aligned print environment would look like for your organisation.
Book your free print security review Or call us on 0300 124 0975Syncro Group helps UK businesses align their print environment with their wider cybersecurity strategy — with dedicated coverage in Northamptonshire, Milton Keynes & Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. Find out more about our managed print services →