Do Your Printers Know When Someone Quits?

Protecting your business starts where most companies forget to look

If someone leaves your company—whether they resign or are let go—your IT team likely follows a checklist: disable email, deactivate their login, collect company devices, and update payroll access.

But here’s a question most companies overlook:

Does your printer know they’re gone?

It may sound like a minor detail, but in reality, it could be a major security gap, especially if you work in a high-risk industry like Financial Services.

Let’s break it down.

 

The Problem: Quitting the Company Doesn’t Always Mean Quitting the Copier

Imagine this: an employee at your financial services firm is terminated. You recover their laptop and cut off their network access. But what if they come back after hours, walk up to your shared office copier, and punch in their still-active PIN?

If your print environment hasn’t been integrated with your identity management system, they may still have full access. They could:

• Release previously queued print jobs they sent before they left
• See what others are printing—including client statements, investment summaries, and internal reports
• Abuse access to sensitive information for personal or competitive gain

And unless someone is checking printer logs, you’d likely never know it happened.

 

The Real-World Risk: What Could Go Wrong?

Let’s say the former employee worked in client services and had a reputation for being disgruntled. They remember that most advisors print client portfolios from the shared copier outside the conference room. They know the timing of your team meetings.

Without badge or PIN deactivation, they could walk in, print sensitive reports, and walk out—all within 90 seconds.

Or imagine they had a print job pending when they were let go:

• A list of client account numbers
• Internal profit-and-loss sheets
• Private HR documentation they printed earlier

If they can still walk up to the copier and release that job, your firewall, password policies, and email encryption mean nothing—because the breach happened on paper.

 

The Solution: Secure Print Starts with Smart Offboarding

The good news? This risk is completely avoidable.

Here’s how companies like yours are solving the problem:

1. Centralized Identity Integration. Connect your printer logins, badge access, and print release settings to the same system that controls your employee accounts. When someone is offboarded from your network, they’re offboarded from your printer access automatically.
2. Badge Release or PIN-Based Authentication. Require users to physically authenticate at the printer to release jobs. This prevents unauthorized users from walking up and printing anything left in the queue.
3. Immediate Deactivation Planning. Coordinate with HR and IT to align termination timing. If an employee is being let go, ensure access is revoked—including print access—at the moment of separation.
4. Print Logs and Monitoring. Keep records of print activity by user and device. This is critical for audits and internal investigations, and it helps spot unusual behavior before it becomes a breach.

 

Why It Matters for Financial Services Firms

In your world, paper is just as regulated as digital data. Printouts of investment strategies, tax documents, or loan applications carry just as much risk as anything stored on a server.

And regulatory bodies don’t accept “We forgot to disable their PIN” as an excuse.

Data loss through printers may seem old-fashioned, but it’s still one of the most common (and least protected) security gaps in modern offices.

 

Our Approach at Novatech

We don’t just install copiers—we secure them.

At Novatech, we help financial services firms audit their print environments, align printer access with their offboarding procedures, and deploy secure printing policies that close the door on unauthorized activity.

We take into account how your business operates—how fast things move, who needs access, and what kind of data is at risk. Then we help you build a system that’s flexible for your team but locked down where it counts.

 

Don’t Let Your Printer Become a Backdoor.

If you’re in financial services, you can’t afford to overlook the security of your print environment. Let’s walk through your current setup and show you where your risks—and opportunities—really are.

 

Schedule your secure print assessment with Novatech today.