The phrase “Don’t trust – verify” is the basic tenet of Zero-Trust architecture today. And with good reason: many of us have been burned by malware, vulnerabilities, attacks, viruses, and other forms of sabotage. These represent a tangible expense; in 2025, Cybersecurity Ventures estimated the total cost of this damage at more than $10 trillion dollars. What’s worse, it is expected to exceed $20 trillion this year.
To mitigate these risks, corporate entities like those that employ us hire experts, consultants, and staff to protect our IT environments. We buy firewalls, architectural components, and even re-build our transaction processing from the ground up to protect every byte of corporate data.
Why, then, do we fail to take the same precautions with printed output?
I have been inside many organizations during my long tenure in data processing. Without fail, I find printers with stacks of paper in and around them that have not been collected. Many companies provide technology to prevent this from happening, and yet it continues.
Moreover, I find it interesting that so few companies care about who is submitting each job to be printed, even in my world of output management software. In my experience, most vendors simply trust the operating system’s opinion of who is printing. Why do this? It is so easy to spoof. An intruder can pretend to be almost anyone and submit jobs into the system.
Not so with LRS. We do not depend on OS methods of driving output. While we are forced to allow the OS to send the data from the application, we intercept that data to ensure that:
- It is encrypted at rest
- It is encrypted in motion
- The user printing is continually authenticated against the corporate IAM / IdP platform
Most companies simply receive the identity of the print submitter as a string from the OS and believe it to be true. That seems to violate the precepts of Zero-Trust in my view.
To me, Zero-Trust must go beyond the technology.
Corporations often select vendors based on budget, or on appearance, or even worse, based on what some vendor says. Many vendors claim some capability but are found to be unreliable when asked to deliver at scale. This forces you, as a customer, to start over in your search for help.
I can’t discount the need to be price conscious, but at the same time, I encourage you not to trust, but instead to verify.
Verify what exactly? I’m glad you asked. Here are some things to check when selecting a vendor in this oft-overlooked area of output management:
- Is the vendor financially stable? Many companies today try to get by while deeply in debt. Who controls that vendor’s behavior… the customer or the financier?
- Can the vendor provide certifications for what they claim to be able to do?
- Can the vendor provide a significant list of other companies that are doing exactly what you require? How long is that list, both in number of customers and years of experience?
As someone who has been at this a long time, I know that these factors are the keys to showing reliability.
I know that LRS has been a trusted provider of output management for nearly half a century. I know that LRS provides output management solutions to thousands of enterprises around the world. I know that LRS provides our functionality on the platforms that our customers need whether that be the IBM z Series mainframe, Unix systems, Linux systems, Windows, or SaaS. We provide secure, scalable, trustworthy products in all of these areas.
All of this can be verified. Not by me, but by major corporations all over the world.
So don’t trust. Verify. When you do, you’ll see that LRS stands in a class by itself.