The Welsh Government Delivers Secure High Available Printing to 6,000 Users

Customizable printing solution simplifies printer management, enhances security and compliance, and increases productivity to meet the complex needs of the public sector

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 2, 2016: Printing virtualization innovator UniPrint.net Corp announced today a comprehensive case study of its 8 year history within The Welsh Government, which can be viewed in its entirety here. Beginning in 2008, Welsh Government deployed UniPrint.net’s Universal Printer Driver solution to eliminate the Citrix printing issues of this sprawling governing body.

Established in 1999, The Welsh Government (Llywodraeth Cymru) is the executive of the National Assembly for Wales. Spanning across Wales from Cardiff in the south to Llandudno Junction in the north, The Welsh Government has 44 offices, including 7 main offices, and approximately 6,000 users within their Citrix network.

The Challenge

Head of ICT Services for The Welsh Government, David Milner, explained the print security challenges they faced:

“We deal with highly sensitive, often classified, confidential personal and policy information each day, so we take security of all aspects of information management extremely seriously. There can be no gaps in our strategy, and the security and integrity of printed information remains paramount.”

The Welsh government undertook a transformation project to address these issues and more, which led them to UniPrint’s secure print solution for large enterprises.

The Solution

Initially, the Government deployed UniPrint Infinity’s Universal Printer Driver technology (UPD) to standardize the HP printing estate, as well as to solve the issues with multiple printer drivers and ongoing updates. By using only 1 UPD in their Citrix environment, The Welsh Government was able to eliminate all printer driver incompatibility issues. Printing costs were reduced and contained, and new default printing options reduced waste and increased ROI.

After consulting with their implementation partner ATOS 2 years ago, The Welsh Government further improved their UPD print infrastructure by installing close to 200 vPad devices to provide the user end-to-end secured desktop experience. vPad Print Appliances are easy to use, deployed in mere minutes, and integrate seamlessly into a UniPrint Infinity environment. Now, every employee prints to a Virtual Print Queue (VPQ) and then uses their individual security pass to release print jobs via the vPad to the predetermined printer on demand.

The Government also incorporated UniPrint Infinity’s High Availability feature to ensure total redundancy of their print infrastructure within their Citrix data centres. This addressed several issues, including managing departments with high print-intensity, improving productivity, preparing for possible extreme disaster recovery scenarios, and ensuring 24/7 printer availability.

UniPrint.net enabled these and many other bespoke features to meet the unique needs of the public sector. This flexibility is very important, O’Connell explained:

“It’s not only avoiding documents ending up in the wrong hands that we have gained over the years of using UniPrint. It’s their feature granularity and flexibility that extends to superfast support, access to their senior R&D team, and unique personalized tweaks…”

Key Benefits

• Secure pull printing for all users, reducing dependency on individual “private” desktop printers
• Increased data protection and compliancy, avoiding abandoned print jobs and reducing waste
• Fully redundant  print infrastructure
• Printer vendor agnostic vPad device offers customers choice, flexibility, and control