Cloud Print Services Landscape, 2025

Navigating market fragmentation, hybrid realities, and evolving
customer concerns

As the era of hybrid work becomes embedded, organisations are increasingly focused on digital transformation,
while building resilient IT infrastructures that can adapt to the future. With its inherent availability, flexibility,
and scalability, the cloud has underpinned this journey beyond traditional on-premise environments, enhancing
agility, data compliance, and security while providing opportunities for improving financial and environmental
cost management.

Cloud-based print management can directly address these needs by reducing the burden on IT teams and
lowering associated variable costs around power, maintenance, real estate and availability. Traditional print
management, reliant on on-premise print servers, demands extensive IT administration. A cloud-based model
can simplify these tasks, freeing IT teams for strategic initiatives such as further business value-add digitisation
activities.

However, the cloud print market remains fragmented, characterised by differing approaches – ‘cloud-first,’
‘cloud-native,’ and hybrid – demanding clarity from OEMs and ISVs regarding their cloud-centric and native
offerings. The cloud is often a lower priority for MPS selection, highlighting a need for greater market education.
Security, performance, and feature parity concerns persist, acting as inhibitors to full cloud adoption and
solidifying the hybrid approach as the prevailing model. Furthermore, a trend toward workload repatriation is
emerging, driven by data sovereignty, latency, and cost considerations. This adds complexity, requiring flexible
solutions that integrate seamlessly with both on-premises and cloud environments. UK and midmarket
organisations demonstrate higher average importance for cloud print, highlighting regional and segmentspecific variations in adoption drivers