Even the smallest businesses are starting to realize – document security matters. But while most stories about security breaches focus on secret government attacks and evil cyber villains, the most common threats are a lot less exciting. It’s fairly easy to lose sensitive files when you’re using the wrong kind of printer.

Check out these tips to help keep your documents secure.

1. Don’t leave documents in the printer tray

Ever hit print but can’t make it to the printer right away? That’s a threat.

In that stack might be someone’s pay review, your customers’ data or your company’s financial plans and roadmap.

Instead, make sure your printer’s smart enough to authenticate your users before it prints out their documents.

Your current printer doesn’t do that? You’re going to want to check out these machines that will.

2. Password-protect your documents before sending

You need to scan a file and send it to your colleague Bill. You’re in a hurry. So you scan the document really quickly and email it to Bill – the wrong Bill. Oops.

You need a printer that helps you password-protect files.

3. Make sure you save sensitive files in a safe folder

Typically, someone who needs to save a scanned document to the cloud must save that scanned file somewhere local first. Whether they save it to the desktop or some local folder, it can become a big problem if they forget to delete that file after copying it to a shared Dropbox or Google Drive or other cloud-based services.

How can the process be made more secure? Make sure you’ve got a printer that’s smart enough to automatically save your users’ files in the cloud for them. Like these.

4. Don’t ask others to print for you

Sometimes remote workers need something printed before they come in. A common way around this is to ask someone else to print the file for them. But if they save that sensitive file in an unsafe place, you might be in trouble.

If your printer supports mobile printing, your remote workers won’t need to go through someone else to print their files. And this won’t be a problem.

5. Don’t leave data on the printer’s hard drive

You probably don’t think of your printer as a computer. But the smartest printers have hard drives that are central to the way information flows through your company.

Not sure how to safeguard yourself? Make sure your printer automatically overwrites its own hard drive for you. More importantly, make sure the printer’s disk is well encrypted too.

No business wants to lose its sensitive information. But you really don’t want to lose that information because of a simple, avoidable mistake.

To ensure you aren’t compromising document security, get yourself a smarter printer – one that has all the features you need to secure the flow of information. And all the intelligence to help your users work in smarter ways.

Ask your Benchmark representative how you can get security right with Xerox® ConnectKey® Technology. Information security is a priority for every size of business. It’s why so many businesses count on Xerox® ConnectKey® Technology to protect themselves.