Organizations of all sizes have prioritized IT initiatives around digital transformation (DX) strategies. Recent events fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic have only intensified these efforts, as businesses search for ways to enable a more efficient and productive distributed workforce. A recent study completed by IDC Research and sponsored by Lexmark shows that cloud migration is the top priority when it comes to driving digital transformation. The future of business is digital-first, which means businesses must modernize IT infrastructure to take advantage of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics.

Nevertheless, businesses face many obstacles when it comes to digital transformation, much of which can be summed up in a single question: how do we ensure support for legacy business systems and processes while migrating to new IT infrastructure? It is a complex problem and a difficult question to answer. Dealing with the challenges presented by lingering IT infrastructure is why so many DX programs have either stalled, yielded limited results, or simply failed to get out of the gate.

What most businesses fail to recognize is how much existing IT infrastructure is tied up in the print environment. Many enterprise organizations have amassed a sprawling print infrastructure comprised of multiple brands and an aging mix of printers, MFPs, scanners, and print servers. This hodgepodge of devices from multiple manufactures is likely not well suited for organizations' current needs, and certainly lacks the flexibility and scalability needed to match the needs of the future digital office. According to the study, most organizations say that lingering print infrastructure is negatively impacting their cloud migration strategy and the ability to support digital workflows.

Moving Print Infrastructure to the Cloud

It is important to understand the crucial role print can play in helping to enable and drive digital transformation. Print remains an integral and important business function, and paper is entrenched in most businesses processes today. According to the IDC study, half of all back-office workflow processes still have significant printing requirements. At the same time, digitizing content and migrating from paper to digital is foundational for any digital transformation strategy. The ability to leverage advanced printing technologies combined with process analytics enabled through cloud-based print management can help organizations meet specific DX goals around content security and information management.

Enterprise organizations face significant challenges as they look to modernize IT infrastructure and establish a digital-first operational model. Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud is not always easy, which is why most tend to transition in phases. IDC's study looks closely at the issues currently hindering DX progress to highlight the opportunities, process, and benefits of moving print infrastructure to the cloud. For many organizations, modernizing the print infrastructure could be the first step towards realizing a truly integrated cloud-based IT model.  

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Robert Palmer is Research Vice President with IDC's Imaging, Printing and Document Solutions team. He is responsible for written research, forecasts, and analysis in multiple practice areas covering managed print services, document solutions, business workflow automation and optimization, and hard copy transformation. Mr. Palmer's research also includes a particular emphasis on the office imaging channel and transformational strategies and technologies impacting the future of the office imaging market.