We gathered insights from Mopria Alliance members on how Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and standards-based approaches are helping organizations evolve their enterprise printing infrastructure.
The Legacy Print Server Challenge
What are the top challenges your customers face with legacy print server dependencies, particularly in hybrid/cloud environments? How do these impact overall IT modernization goals?
“For decades, enterprise print infrastructure has relied on on‑premise print servers. While effective in a static office environment, this model imposes a significant operational burden: organizations must procure, secure, patch, and replace server hardware on regular refresh cycles, typically every three to five years. As enterprises expanded across multiple sites and geographies, this approach became increasingly fragile, with each location introducing additional infrastructure, support complexity, and points of failure. These challenges are magnified in today’s mobile and hybrid workforce. Users moving between offices, or working remotely from home or temporary locations, must navigate changing print servers, inconsistent driver availability, and unclear routing to either local or “home” printers. Industry research confirms that legacy print infrastructure now acts as a barrier to broader IT modernization, particularly cloud adoption and workforce mobility, rather than enabling it.”
-Mike Scrutton, Director of Print Strategy & Technology at Adobe
Modern Infrastructure: Standards-Based Solutions
Customer demand is driving the evolution toward more flexible, standards-based printing infrastructure. Mopria IPP enables direct device-to-printer communication, reducing dependency on intermediary servers while providing enterprise-grade security and management capabilities across the entire ecosystem—from mobile devices to document management workflows.
How are you helping customers modernize their printing infrastructure within broader digital transformation strategies? What benefits resonate most with IT decision-makers when complementing existing systems with standards-based solutions?
“Print infrastructure is now following the same cloud-first, standards-aligned path as collaboration and identity services. In 2025, nearly two-thirds of new deployments moved to cloud architectures, reducing reliance on servers and drivers while embedding security and compliance by design, thereby strengthening alignment with zero-trust principles. This change reduces IT teams’ infrastructure and operational overhead and provides faster deployment and simpler scaling across regions.”
-Adam Bishop, Chief Marketing Officer at Y Soft
What implementation approaches work best for enterprises looking to reduce print server dependencies with Mopria IPP-based solutions? How do you demonstrate value and measure success in hybrid environments?
“Customers’ device capabilities are a big factor in implementation. Our customers target pure cloud implementation where devices allow, and hybrid where it’s needed. Today, 45.9% of embedded terminals are already pure cloud (we continue to invest in pure cloud embedded clients, so this number is expected to grow significantly). Around 19.3% of customers use edge-powered hybrid architectures to support legacy devices or low-bandwidth sites, which makes modernization without disruption possible.
SAFEQ Cloud customers measure success using platform metrics such as:
- Reduction in server footprint
- Operational efficiency: Many management tasks are effectively outsourced to the cloud provider. For example, 84% of our on-prem customers haven’t updated their installations in the last 12 months. In the cloud, this responsibility sits with Y Soft as the provider, and our offering is updated every two weeks through an auto-update sequence that pushes to customer environments worldwide.
- End-to-end service availability (99.97% over the last 12 months) measured by actual print and scan outcomes, not just server uptime.”
-Adam Bishop, Chief Marketing Officer at Y Soft
Industry Evolution & Future Trends
As cloud-first strategies become standard, printing infrastructure continues evolving toward more flexible, standards-based models. Mopria IPP provides foundational technology that aligns with enterprise cloud architectures and emerging industry trends.
Looking ahead, how do you see printing infrastructure evolving to support emerging technologies like zero-trust security, edge computing, and AI-driven IT operations? What role do universal standards play in this evolution?
“As organizations accelerate digital transformation, print infrastructure is evolving from a static, device‑centric model into a cloud‑connected, intelligence‑driven ecosystem. The goal of service providers is to enable secure, scalable, and continuously updated capabilities that remove the burden of on‑premise infrastructure while strengthening control and visibility.
Looking ahead, zero‑trust security will become the foundation of modern print environments. Every device, user, and workflow interaction will require verification. We have customers moving their entire print infrastructure to isolated networks connected and limited only to direct cloud services, enabling them to offload that entire experience from standard corporate IT and still providing secure, real-time, reliable print.
At the same time, edge computing will push decision‑making closer to the device. Printers will increasingly analyze data locally to enforce policies, detect anomalies, and optimize performance with lower latency.
Layered on top, AI‑driven IT operations will transform support. Predictive analytics will identify failures before they occur, automate configuration management, and streamline fleet optimization. Continuous updates, remote configuration, and granular control across global fleets will become expectations for modern print fleets.
The future of printing isn’t just connected—it’s intelligent, adaptive, and secure by default.”
-Eric McCann, Manager, Technology Portfolio Architect at Lexmark, a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation
“We see print infrastructure evolving toward zero-trust by default as cloud adoption grows and secure release, encrypted communication, and centralized policy enforcement become baseline expectations. In a cloud-first context, zero-trust security principles are fully embedded in the service. Securing and authorizing all internal communications, endpoints, and users (via secure identity and access management) is a must, especially as customers increasingly move to internet-only environments.
On top of that, we see edge components persisting, but as lightweight extensions of cloud platforms, not management centers. Many architectures continue to operate as edge-enabled, but cloud-managed, aligning with Mopria IPP’s direct device-to-printer communication model.
With billions of print and scan events processed annually, cloud platforms create a solid foundation for data-driven, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and automated optimization; capabilities that are impractical in fragmented, server-based environments.
Universal standards like Mopria IPP are essential to this evolution. They eliminate driver complexity and allow printing to integrate cleanly into cloud-native, security-first IT ecosystems, ensuring print evolves in parallel with, not behind, modern infrastructure.”
-Adam Bishop, Chief Marketing Officer at Y Soft
Ready to modernize your printing infrastructure? Explore how Mopria certified solutions enable driverless printing and help enhance your enterprise printing capabilities.
This roundtable features insights from Mopria Alliance members committed to advancing universal printing standards. Learn more about cloud-native printing solutions at Mopria.org.
