The End of the Print Driver
The printer is the most overlooked endpoint in the enterprise — sitting on the network with system-level privileges, untouched architecturally for 20 years, and quietly perfect for spoofing, DDoS staging, and zombie-printer pivots. Kevin Pickhardt, Executive Chairman of Pharos and a Xerox PARC alum from the era of mice and GUIs, joins Alan Shimel on Techstrong TV to explain why print finally has the security industry’s attention. Kevin walks Alan through Pharos’s founding belief that “devices don’t print, users do,” the company’s invention of pull printing, and the larger shift from securing pages to securing document flows, identities, and Zero-Trust policies across enterprise print. They dig into Microsoft’s Windows Protected Print mandate that deprecates third-party drivers in favor of IPP, why every enterprise needs a migration plan now, and how AI changes the print analytics game once the platform is API-first.
