Print infrastructure is the biggest zero trust gap CIOs haven’t closed: Survey

Vasion today released new research revealing a security gap hiding in plain sight across enterprise IT: CIOs and IT leaders know their print environments carry risk, but print remains largely outside their Zero Trust strategies even as failures continue to disrupt business operations.

According to an independent survey of 500+ enterprise CIOs and senior IT leaders commissioned by Vasion through Censuswide, 54% of respondents describe their print environment as “actively managed, with known and accepted risks.” At the same time, 61% report that print or document workflow failures disrupt their business at least once a week.

The finding points to a broader issue: print may not be viewed as broken, but it remains an accepted area of exposure and operational friction. The gap becomes stark when survey respondents assess their own Zero Trust progress. Cloud workloads lead at 66% coverage, followed by endpoint security at 61% and identity management at 58%. Print infrastructure trails every category at just 16%.

That means the infrastructure handling sensitive documents across the enterprise remains dramatically less covered by Zero Trust strategies than the systems surrounding it. Closing that gap becomes more urgent as enterprises move toward AI. A full 64% of CIOs and IT leaders say establishing or expanding AI is a leading 2026 focus.

“CIOs want AI agents doing real work inside their document workflows,” said Corey Ercanbrack, CTO at Vasion. “Those workflows still run through print and scan, and in most organizations that layer sits outside Zero Trust with no identity binding and no audit trail. You can’t give an agent access to a layer you can’t verify. Closing the print gap isn’t just security cleanup. It’s the prerequisite for end-to-end agentic AI.”