A PAPERCUT WHITEPAPER

Edge Mesh: How to get
print resiliency andsecurity without servers
June 2023© Copyright 2023 PaperCut So ware Pty Ltd

PaperCut Edge Mesh Whitepaper
Version 3.0; June 2023

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Introduction.................................................................................................................................. 3
On-premise - printing locally.......................................................................................................... 3
Cloud printing today...................................................................................................................... 4Enter: Edge Mesh!.......................................................................................................................... 5
What features come with “the best of both worlds”?........................................................................ 6
Converting infrastructure from local to cloud.................................................................................................. 7
Self-healing components.................................................................................................................................. 7
Full-system resiliency........................................................................................................................................ 7
Maximum security............................................................................................................................................. 8
Secure local printing...................................................................................................................................9Zero Trust networking.............................................................................................................................. 10
Principles of Edge Mesh zero trust.................................................................................................................. 10
Looking to the future....................................................................................................................11
Works cited................................................................................................................................. 12
Thank you................................................................................................................................... 13
Authors...................................................................................................................................................... 13
Significant contributors............................................................................................................................ 13
PaperCut HQ..............................................................................................................................................13
Support..................................................................................................................................................... 13© Copyright 2023 PaperCut So ware Pty Ltd

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Introduc on
It should come as no surprise that businesses love the cloud - the benefits are clear and organizations
are quickly shedding their locally-hosted applications. Printing, on the other hand, is something thatmost businesses today still rely on “on-premise” solutions for.
Thereʼs something to be said about local infrastructure. Itʼs great to be able to unplug the internet andstill have things work for you. No matter what the application, there are still good arguments in favor of
keeping things local and good arguments for pushing up to the cloud. Despite some great features in
the cloud, though, it isnʼt always a perfect option - a solution that truly oﬀers the best features of bothcloud infrastructure and local resources.
Printing is one of those things that historically has not made technical leaps outside the local network.
Yes, there are ways to get some of the awesomeness of the cloud into your printing environment, butsometimes you might find yourself missing that sweet simplicity of the local alternative. Printing
environments really need something that truly provides the best of both cloud and local infrastructure.
That something exists, and it’s called Edge Mesh.

72% of businesses expected to increase their cloud
adoption this year…
International Legal Technology Association

On-premise - prin ng locallyPrinting today is firmly rooted in the traditional client-server relationship within a local network.
This long history of local printing means that managing a local environment is familiar. To function, thelocal print environment isn’t locked to specific brands or product lines. A physical server simply stays
on-site to provide access control and ease of deployment. All of your core functionality is centralized inyour network, and it remains fully manageable at all times.
This is great! Local assets are quick to respond since network latency is practically eliminated.
Meanwhile, hardware can be physically accounted for, and you can control everything directly. You
know it’s going to work because you can personally fix anything you see going wrong before it happens.
The environment doesn’t rely on a cloud provider to stay available. If things go bad in the cloud, you
can rest easy, since your local resources will still be there, ready to meet your needs.

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Relying on local network infrastructure is vital in making your printing resources stay as available aspossible. Since people reasonably expect printing to just work, this stability makes for a great printing
experience.
The practical benefits of control and availability aren’t the only reason to rely on local printing. Keeping
things local also has another vital advantage: data sovereignty. The data you send through your local
infrastructure stays in your hands at all times. No other organizations have the opportunity to handle
your information.
But, of course, local printing comes with a cost. You need skilled IT people on site or on call to manage
and maintain local infrastructure.

Cloud prin ng today
Printing in the cloud takes a lot of administration out of your hands. You don’t have to worry about yourserver, because it’s backed by dozens of servers all managed by the cloud provider (Fig. 1). The cloudoﬀers a predictable budget with the service billing model, a hugely scalable environment, and a uniqueguarantee of availability. If an organization has a surge in printing, the cloud can automatically scale tomeet the demands. All this is an excellent start to a great solution. However, you lose a lot of the control
that comes with local infrastructure. For starters, an organization now needs a reliable Internet Service
Provider. The organization’s data sovereignty is reduced, and your environment now relies on a 3rdparty to keep your printing running.
With cloud functionality as a foundation, many organizations look to achieve the benefits of local
printing by keeping the job locally and only sending metadata to the cloud (Fig. 2). Solutions like
PaperCut MF hosted in the Cloud, among others, add network-edge appliances to localize critical partsof the cloud’s workload. This method is a great way to move toward the best of both cloud and local.
No matter what you call it though, an edge appliance is still a piece of hardware for which your IT staﬀ
are the first line of defense. It’s not quite a server, but it comes with some of the same maintenance andsingle-point-of-failure concerns that a local server has.

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So, our current options are ease of use and aﬀordability with cloud, full-featured and securefunctionality with local infrastructure, or a little bit of both (but not quite everything we want!) witha hybrid environment.

Enter: Edge Mesh!
We use the philosophy of “Mesh” every day - even if we don’t think about it. Ask yourself: “Do we wantto keep the knowledge of our operating procedures with just one person? Would we prefer a limited
reliance on key personnel? What if an individual with valuable knowledge is out sick for the day when
we need them?” The answers are easy: it’s better to have a team build-in redundancy and avoid any
single point of failure. Well, the philosophy behind Edge Mesh is the same: enable the parts of yournetwork to function as a team, each able to perform multiple roles.

The Edge Mesh solves the problems of both cloud printing and local infrastructure byturning your existing devices into redundant components of a collective print server.
To speak in more general terms, the Edge Mesh is a computing paradigm that uses a mesh network ofedge devices (users' computers) and routers to enable distributed decision-making for printing within
the network.
The edge devices are called “edge nodes” within the mesh and are the “brains” of the print
management process. They learn how to interact with the cloud, but they are fully capable of making
their own decisions once they know what to do.
Each computer in the network becomes an “edge node” in the Edge Mesh - so rather than printing to aqueue that you’ve set up on your server, you print to the so ware running on an edge node (forexample, a user’s PC).

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The second you press print, the Edge Mesh works with the cloud to determine the best nodes for thejob and distributes the file accordingly to ensure it’s successfully printed. If a node happens to go
oﬀline, your printing environment stays available because of the Edge Mesh. This reliability is theadvanced interaction of local infrastructure and cloud computing that an organization needs to truly
get the best of both worlds.

What features come with “the bestof both worlds”?
When the Edge Mesh is designed into a print solution, organizations can have a true enterprise
printing experience with the budget of a small to medium-sized business. High security, near-zerolatency, and high scalability are all built into the Edge Mesh's architecture. With all of these features
working together to replace the server as we know it, administrators can rest easy knowing they
don’t have to worry about migrating and protecting their servers in the cloud.

Features

Local
Infrastructur
e Prin ng

PublicCloud
Prin ngEdge
Mesh

Oﬀline Func onality

YES

✘

YES

Near-zero Latency

YES

✘

YES

High Security

YES

✘

YES

Direct Management

YES

✘

YES

Scalability

✘

YES

YES

High Availability

✘

YES

YES

Cost eﬀec ve

✘

YES

YES

Easy administra on

✘

YES

YES

Oﬀ-premise Print Submission

✘

YES

YES

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Converting infrastructure from local to cloud
The migration process from physical infrastructure to cloud infrastructure is traditionally a taxing one.
Building complex migration schedules, planning and staging the move, and shouldering the expense ofa parallel migration - things can get messy.
By contrast, the Edge Mesh eliminates this complexity. The mesh adopts your existing infrastructureand dynamically grows with your network. You can manage a partial or full migration on your own
time. If an organization is not ready to say farewell to its server infrastructure, it can still utilize its
server's computing power to benefit the Edge Mesh. Server nodes can be promoted to skew edge node
selection (part of the printing process) toward themselves to further improve high-availability printing.

For many companies, the cost savings alone can be adriver towards deploying an edge-computing architecture.
Network World, 2019

Self-healing components
In a network of 50, 100, or even 1000 computers, you might expect one or two servers to handle
printing. However, with an Edge Mesh printing solution, this relationship is perfectly scalable. As a newhost is added to the printing environment, it can commit some of its resources to the Edge Mesh.
As your printing environment grows, so does the number of hosts capable of handling the processed
print jobs. If a single edge node fails, another node in the Edge Mesh will take its place. As long as one
node is online, job processing continues.
The Edge Mesh’s high availability doesn’t end with hardware failover. The mesh also applies highavailability to the jobs it processes. Print jobs are triple-protected from the failure of any single node
since, on job submission, the document makes its way to three separate nodes. Maintaining job
redundancy allows admins to be sure that when a user releases a print job, the job will be there aseﬀiciently as possible.

Full-system resiliency
Edge nodes open up many possibilities for resilient and fail-safe printing operations. For example,
nodes within the Edge Mesh communicate with one another to determine where the job is and where it
needs to go to get printed.
If a node doesn’t have access to the printer that the job needs to be released on, the Edge Mesh can finda node that can send the job to the required printer. With these mechanisms in place, it takes a verysignificant network disruption to stop printing (and, by then, you’ve probably got other things to worry
about...).

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As more computers are added to your network, so does the number of nodes capable ofhandling the processed jobs.
Additionally, network administrators don’t have to worry about scheduling maintenance windows to
update server so ware when issues or ineﬀiciencies are discovered.
In a traditional server environment, server downtime needs to be scheduled for upgrades to take place.
The risk of losing print functions during the upgrade just had to be accepted. With the Edge Mesh, theedge nodes individually communicate with the cloud for up-to-date network routing information. Thismeans that the nodes can patch themselves in a way that maintains enterprise availability for theentire print infrastructure. No downtime. No data loss.

Maximum security
The Edge Mesh is also an important part of securing interactions with the cloud. Sending a job throughthe cloud opens up otherwise secure documents to the risks of being “on the internet”. You need totrust that your cloud provider is handling your data carefully and that all points that the job travels
through are correctly maintained for security.
Having a fully-capable mesh of computing resources available locally means that a job never has toleave the network to begin with. Not to mention that in an Edge Mesh, no organization outside of yourown ever handles your documents.

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Secure local printing
Of course, just “being local” does not necessarily mean “being secure”.

“From a security perspective,
Zero-Trust can better track andblock external attackers, while
limiting security breaches resulting
from internal human error.”“Average Size of a Data
Breach: 25,000+ Records”“Average Cost per-record:$242.00 USD”
IBM, 2020

Defense Innovation Board, 2019

Mesh networks are not just something that you can “plug into” like a physical network. The Edge Meshdoesn’t rely on a physical connection or a single traditional password to enable access. Instead, thecloud governs access to the mesh network, which challenges new hosts to verify access to the Edge
Mesh.
Since the cloud is the source of all the Edge Mesh’s initial configurations, trust is built into the meshwithout the potential of compromising security.
An increasingly common practice with IoT device management and printer infrastructure is to hostdevices on a separate dedicated VLAN - o en called an Infrastructure VLAN. This isolates devices into
their own security zone (for example, you might have a complex password on your WIFI, but connecting
to the network using a printer’s ethernet cable might make this security moot!).

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PaperCut’s Edge Mesh helps with network security, too. The mesh contains an
intelligent routing algorithm so jobs can “hop” via nodes in the Edge Mesh to navigate
to other network segments.
Print jobs can flow by traversing a boundary node connecting the VLANs. One common method toenable this is to configure a Virtual Machine with edge node so ware, granting it access to both VLANs.
In a similar methodology used with Kerberos, the cloud becomes the manager of the relationships
between computers and printers within the mesh. This means that the necessary information to
decrypt the data in the mesh cannot be extracted from any single node on the network. Instead, thecloud can provide the foundation for the encryption.

Zero Trust networking
From the ground up, our Edge Mesh is built to adhere to the principles of Zero Trust networking. Even
the metadata that does leave the network makes its way to the cloud using an encrypted HTTPS
connection.
Although, by definition, the principles of Zero Trust networking are not just an “authenticate once andcall it a day” configuration. Once an edge node is added to an Edge Mesh, it can’t just go printing
without extra validation and security measures.
Ongoing communication between the Edge Mesh and the cloud enables the mesh to apply security
settings to jobs in real time. If a node is kicked out of the mesh, its token is removed and the othernodes will reject authentication from the node that has le the mesh.

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Every step in submitting and printing a job is made with security in mind.
When a user sends a job, it’s securely transmitted via HTTPS into the Edge Mesh. Each of the threecopies of the job is securely distributed through the Edge Mesh to the best edge nodes for the job.
A er analysis, the Edge Mesh encrypts the data using a three-part key provided by the cloud and stores
it for later. Unlike your car or a safe, the next thing the Edge Mesh does is discard the key. Even if anedge node with a job stored on it has a sudden change of heart and becomes a bad actor, the data
within it may as well be gibberish. To unencrypt and process that job into meaningful information, theedge node needs to contact the cloud, authenticate, get the key again, and unlock the file.

47% of enterprise IT security teams lack conﬁdence intheir ability to provide Zero Trust,” despite 79% oforganizations planning to adopt it.
Pulse Secure, 2020

The Edge Mesh is built from scratch to comply with the most secure industry standards. Each edge
node is purpose-built to oﬀer a higher level of security than is commonly found in traditional print
environments. Zero Trust guards against all access-based compromises and protects data at every
point within the Edge Mesh. The Edge Mesh makes zero-trust accessible to any administrator because
it’s built into the way the mesh works.

Looking to the future
The Edge Mesh has the potential to shi how printers work in networks. Mesh technology brings to
networks the practically-zero latency and high security of local network resources, along with themassive scalability and high availability of using the cloud.
A company with just three or four computers in their entire network could never consider anenterprise, zero-trust, print environment - until Edge Mesh, that is.
Despite the impressive feature set that can be oﬀered with Edge Mesh technology, the functionality
doesn’t come at the cost that’s traditionally associated with high performance. Edge Mesh stands as ademocratizing shi in the structure of our networks. No longer is the barrier to entry of high availability
insurmountable for the small-to-medium-sized business.
For organizations of every size, the Edge Mesh drives performance and security and is a significant firststep in spreading the use of high-security, zero-trust networking to all organizations.
PaperCut believes that the Edge Mesh is the future of managed printing services, and we’re excited to
be working with this game-changing innovation in our cloud platforms, PaperCut Pocket andPapertCut Hive.

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Works cited
McCue, Jim “ILTA 2019 Technology Survey Executive Summary” International Legal Technology
Association, September 2019
“What is edge computing and why it matters” Network World, 2019
“The 2020 State of It” Spiceworks 2020 Spiceworks, Inc.
“The State of Application High Availability” SIOS
DelBene, Kurt, et al. “The Road to Zero Trust (Security)” Defense Innovation Board, 9 July, 2019“2020 Zero Trust Progress Report” CyberSecurity Insiders/Pulse Secure, 2020
Y. Sahni, J. Cao, S. Zhang, and L. Yang, "Edge Mesh: A New Paradigm to Enable Distributed Intelligencein Internet of Things," in IEEE Access, vol. 5, pp. 16441-16458, 2017, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2739804.
“Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020” IBM, 2020

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Thank you

Authors
Jim Gebhardt (Systems Architect)
Tyler Alvord (Frontline Support Engineer)

Significant contributors
Geoﬀ Smith (Distinguished Product Engineer)
Chris Dance (Founder & CEO)Bez Mozaﬀari (Senior Product Engineer)
Irina Sutyagina (Product Engineer)

PaperCut HQsales@papercut.com
papercut.com

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