From Quantum Resilience to Identity Fatigue: Three Trends Shaping Print Security in 2026
Advances in AI and automation will continue to reshape how organizations operate in 2026, helping employees work smarter and faster and unlocking new levels of efficiency.
Inside the Rise of the Always Watching, Always Learning Enterprise Defense System
Advances in AI and automation will continue to reshape how organizations operate in 2026, helping employees work smarter and faster and unlocking new levels of efficiency. However, without the right security, new technology can expand the attack surface and expose enterprises and SMBs alike to potential new risks — making it harder to keep employees productive and protected. While security strategies are usually updated to address emerging threats, the printing ecosystem is still a persistent point of exposure. Embedded in everyday workflows, networked printers function as edge devices. If compromised, they can provide attackers with a direct route into corporate networks, enabling sensitive data theft, lateral movement or attacks that knock critical devices out of service. Print security risks from large enterprises down to SMBs will only worsen in 2026, as AI-powered threats intensify cybercrime, assisting attackers with complex tasks such as vulnerability discovery. As printers increasingly appear on attackers’ radar, organizations will need a more holistic view of cyber resilience that extends to the print ecosystem. The following are the three print security trends to watch out for in 2026: Organizations Must Take Notice of Print, IoT and Edge Security After a String of Attacks Despite a year of high-profile attacks against connected devices in 2025, where security vulnerabilities allowed remote takeovers of printers, various organizations lack basic visibility and control over print infrastructure. This creates security blind spots — from exploitation attempts to insider threats, outdated firmware, malicious updates and misconfigurations, such as open ports or unchanged default credentials. After all, printers are most often used by cybercriminals as a launchpad to capture ever-escalating permissions. This enables threat actors to access the broader network of data and devices. In the year ahead, organizations and governments should demand that endpoint devices, such as printers, come with continuous and active system monitoring throughout their life cycle. Future-proofing security will mean securing the complete device ecosystem, including printers. Having the ability to automate print fleet security compliance and assessment of fleet firmware vulnerability status will minimize IT overhead for security-conscious organizations in 2026. Quantum Resilience Will Increasingly Influence Printer Decisions A year on from the introduction of new NIST standards for quantum-resistant asymmetric cryptography, public sector and critical infrastructure companies are going to accelerate planning and vendor engagements to chart a path toward migration. This process will reveal the scale of the challenge. With NIST intending to deprecate RSA-2048 by 2030 and all RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography by 2035, various vendors are likely to seize the opportunity to move directly from RSA-2048 to quantum-resistant algorithms — particularly in critical industries and long-life systems, such as hardware. With ongoing advances in quantum computing, the prospect of a quantum computer capable of breaking asymmetric cryptography within a decade is becoming increasingly plausible. The U.S. government’s decision to set a quantum-resistance deadline of 2027 for new National Security System devices signals this urgency. Adding to the pressure, the threat from ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks means data must be protected today against future breaches. To become quantum resilient, organizations must start by preparing their long-lived hardware, including printers. With an office-class commercial printer lifespan of between four and five years, devices procured in 2026 have the potential to be in use within the time frame of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. As a result, from 2026 onward, quantum resilience will increasingly influence hardware procurement decisions. This will increase pressure on device manufacturers to future-proof their devices by embedding quantum-resistant cryptography into their products, while pushing for the protection of long-life data. By embedding quantum resilience now, organizations can maintain trust in the technologies shaping the future of work. Organizations Will Shift to Unified Identity, Provenance and Persistent Control We’ll also see efforts within cybersecurity shift from fragmented identity frameworks and perimeter-based controls to a unified, data-centric model. Today’s zero-trust implementations often create complexity and fatigue, with identity scattered across users, apps and devices. This fragmentation leads to blind spots, inconsistent enforcement and poor user experience. The next phase will prioritize consolidation: Centralized identity orchestration that simplifies access, strengthens governance and reduces operational risk. At the same time, we’ll see security move from focusing on the point of entry to managing the custody of data throughout its life cycle. Organizations will need visibility into where data originates, how it is used and who has access — even after it leaves their boundaries. Identity and policy will travel with the data, embedded through persistent controls, telemetry and rich metadata. Dynamic permissions, such as “Can I share this?” will evolve into continuous oversight, ensuring compliance online and offline. Provenance and life cycle control will also become critical in the age of AI, where transparency and trust are nonnegotiable. By embedding identity, custody and governance controls into the core of digital ecosystems, organizations will achieve stronger, adaptive security that protects without adding friction. Future-Proof Your Print Security in 2026 to Secure the Future of Work As the threat to print ecosystems escalates, quantum advances loom and identity management fatigue sets in, reassessing printer security posture in 2026 will be essential to protecting the future of work. Embedding security within printers remains one of the most effective defenses for the year ahead. These robust print security strategies must combine automated recovery, isolation technologies and quantum-resistant BIOS security to guarantee uptime, form a fortified barrier against intrusion and counter next-generation attacks. Finally, in an increasingly distributed environment, organizations will need secure visibility and control over their fleet of printers and at scale.
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