Managed Print & Photocopiers for Technology, IT & Telecoms
In a sector built on intellectual property, customer data and uptime, print is rarely top of the IT director’s priority list — until a source-code printout is found in a shared tray, a Cyber Essentials Plus auditor flags an MFD with no encrypted hard drive, or the operations team realises the print estate is the only piece of infrastructure that hasn’t been touched by their cloud-first programme.
The sector at a glance
The UK Digital and Technologies sector employed 1.33 million people and generated £158 billion in gross value added in 2024 under the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s current company-level definition[1]. It includes software, cloud and managed services, communications, data infrastructure, systems integration and related digital businesses.
Print, scan and document workflows in this environment are quietly business-critical. Engineering teams produce build documentation, network diagrams, rack layouts and change records. Sales and bid teams turn out high-stakes proposals, statements of work and partner-tier marketing collateral. Finance and HR run on the same kinds of contracts, payslips and confidential correspondence as any other organisation, but with a higher-than-average proportion of staff working remotely or across multiple sites. And almost everything that touches a printer or an MFD touches sensitive data — intellectual property, personal data under UK GDPR, or contractual material covered by NDAs and customer security schedules.
Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001 audits increasingly look at the print estate as part of the overall information-security posture. Devices that store unencrypted job data on internal hard drives, that allow open print release in shared spaces, or that have no audit trail of who printed what, when, are no longer acceptable in a serious technology business — and yet they remain extremely common, because print has historically been managed separately from IT.
Challenges we see in the sector
Source code, network diagrams and IP on shared output trays
Engineering teams print rack layouts, network topology diagrams, configuration printouts and code review extracts every day. In an open-plan office — or worse, a shared co-working floor — documents containing customer infrastructure detail, credentials redacted only by hand, and proprietary architecture sit on output trays for hours. The information-security risk is real and is increasingly picked up at audit, where a single uncollected document can trigger a non-conformance against ISO 27001 control A.7.7 (clear desk and clear screen) or a compensating-control finding under Cyber Essentials Plus.
Print and scan are treated outside the IT estate
Many tech businesses have first-class IT operations — centralised endpoint management, MDM for mobile, SSO across SaaS, encrypted laptops as standard — and then a print estate procured years earlier on a separate finance lease, managed by office services, with no centralised user authentication, no encrypted hard drives and no audit log. The result is a parallel, lower-grade infrastructure handling the same sensitive data as the rest of the estate, but without any of the controls.
Hybrid and remote-first working makes legacy print servers obsolete
Modern technology businesses operate hybrid by default. Engineers and consultants work from home, from client sites, from co-working hubs and from headquarters in equal measure. Print servers tied to a specific office, with drivers deployed via on-premises group policy, do not survive contact with this way of working. Staff resort to emailing documents to themselves, printing on home consumer printers, or simply not printing — with all the data-leakage and audit-trail problems that creates.
Multi-site UK and international networks with inconsistent device standards
Telecoms operators, MSPs, system integrators and cloud-service providers typically run from a network of UK offices, occasionally with overseas footprints. Each site has historically procured its own printers, on its own contract, with its own consumables supply. The result is a fragmented estate where group IT has no inventory, no usage data, no consistent security baseline, and no leverage on consumable costs — problems that compound as the business grows by acquisition.
Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001 increasingly bring print into scope
Recent revisions to Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 explicitly cover network-attached printing and multifunction devices. Auditors look for encrypted hard drives, secure boot, automatic data overwrite, user authentication at the device, and audit logs of print, scan and copy activity. MFDs procured five or more years ago typically support none of these as standard. Tech companies pursuing or maintaining these certifications — often as a contractual condition of selling to enterprise or public-sector customers — find their existing print estate is the weakest link.
Bid, marketing and partner collateral demands premium colour output
Tech sales is a high-stakes, document-heavy business. Customer-facing proposals, statements of work, partner-tier badge documents, technical white papers and event collateral all need to come off a colour MFD looking like a finished product, not a draft. When the device handling these documents is also being asked to keep up with engineering print volumes and HR confidential output on the same shared queue, quality and reliability suffer at exactly the wrong moments.
How we help
Secure print release tied to your existing identity
Our MFDs integrate with Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), Okta, Google Workspace and on-premises Active Directory for user authentication at the device. Print jobs are held in a secure queue and only released when the user authenticates — via PIN, ID badge or mobile app. Documents containing source code, customer infrastructure detail, contracts and personal data never sit unattended on output trays. Every print, scan and copy event is logged against the authenticated user, providing the audit trail that ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus assessors increasingly expect.
Cloud-native print management for hybrid and multi-site teams
We deploy cloud print management platforms that eliminate on-premises print servers altogether. Staff submit jobs from any device — corporate laptop, personal laptop, mobile, tablet — and release them at any enabled MFD across the UK estate. Engineers moving between a London HQ, a Manchester engineering hub and home offices print and scan against the same secure infrastructure regardless of location. There are no site-specific drivers to manage, no print servers to patch, and no VPN dependency for remote staff.
Security controls matched to the selected configuration
Security controls are available depending on the device and configuration selected. These can include encrypted storage, automatic data overwrite, user authentication, secure print release and audit logging. Some controls require additional licences, accessories, PaperCut or configuration and are included only where stated in the quotation.
Scan-to-cloud workflows aligned to how tech teams work
Scan directly from the MFD into Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams), Google Drive, Dropbox, Box or your choice of secure file repository, with OCR applied so the resulting document is searchable. For engineering teams capturing whiteboard sessions, signed change records or hand-marked design reviews, this turns the MFD into part of the documentation pipeline rather than a one-way print device.
Consolidated, group-wide managed print contract
A single managed-print contract across every UK site — one device standard, one service-level agreement, one consolidated invoice, one set of usage reports. Group IT and finance get full inventory and cost visibility, automatic toner replenishment is available with eligible monitored service agreements, engineer response is contracted to defined response and fix targets, and the estate is right-sized to actual usage rather than legacy site-by-site procurement decisions. For tech businesses growing by acquisition, the model integrates new sites quickly and consistently.
Premium colour output for bid and marketing collateral
Our Toshiba and Develop colour MFDs deliver the colour accuracy, paper-handling flexibility and finishing options that customer-facing documents demand. Bid teams produce statements of work, proposals and partner-tier collateral that look the part — without resorting to outsourced print shops or compromised in-office reproduction. The same device handles the engineering and admin volume reliably, because the platform is sized for the workload rather than scaled down for cost alone.
What this looks like in practice
Estate consolidation that scales with growth
News UK reduced its device estate from 720 devices to 200 and then to 65, reporting annual paper and toner savings of £130,000. Liberty Global’s separate Toshiba deployment covered more than 50 MFPs and projected annual savings of more than 30%. These are not marginal optimisations; they are step-changes in how a tech business pays for and manages its print infrastructure.
Print brought inside the security perimeter
Tech businesses that bring their MFDs into the same security baseline as the rest of their IT estate — encrypted storage, authenticated release, full audit logs, automatic data overwrite — consistently report that print stops being a Cyber Essentials Plus or ISO 27001 audit blocker and starts being part of the evidence base. The compliance posture improves, customer security questionnaires get easier to complete, and the IP exposure from uncollected output trays is closed off entirely.
Cloud print that survives hybrid working
Cloud-native print management means an engineer working from home on Monday, from the office on Wednesday and from a customer site on Friday submits jobs to the same secure queue and releases them on the nearest authorised device — without a VPN, without a site-specific driver, and without the IT helpdesk involvement that legacy print environments demand. For tech businesses where hybrid working is the default rather than the exception, this alone justifies the move.
What to look for in a print partner
- Secure print release with integration to your existing identity provider (Entra ID, Okta, Google, AD)
- Security controls matched to the device and configuration, with required licences, accessories, PaperCut or setup stated in the quotation
- Cloud-native print management with no on-premises print server dependency
- Full audit logging of print, scan and copy activity to support ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus
- Scan-to-cloud integration with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and your document management platform
- A single managed-print contract across every UK site, with consolidated reporting and one accountable provider
- Proactive consumable management and contracted engineer response to defined SLAs
- Premium colour output capability for bid, marketing and partner collateral
The bottom line
Technology, IT and telecoms businesses run on intellectual property, customer data and uptime — and their print infrastructure should be held to the same standard as the rest of their IT estate. Secure release, encrypted storage, full audit trails, cloud-native management and a single accountable provider across every site are not premium features in this sector; they are the baseline for any serious operator.
All UK Copiers works with software houses, MSPs, telecoms operators, system integrators and IT consultancies across the UK to deliver Toshiba managed print environments that meet that baseline — with the case studies, the cost reductions and the audit-readiness to back it up.
Sources: [1] DSIT — Digital and Technologies sector economic statistics, [2] Ofcom — Connected Nations Report 2024/25, [3] Toshiba Tec — News UK case study, [4] Toshiba Tec — Liberty Global case study
Statistics cited above are drawn from the sources listed. Illustrative examples and ranges presented elsewhere on this page reflect our operational experience delivering managed print services to UK technology, IT and telecoms businesses.
Is your print estate the weakest link in your security posture?
Whether you’re pursuing Cyber Essentials Plus, renewing ISO 27001 or simply ready to retire a fragmented multi-site print estate, talk to us — we work with technology businesses across the UK from start-ups to FTSE 100 operators.