How to Manage Large Amounts of Digital Assets in an Enterprise?
Content is king, and by content we’re not only talking about text, but all digital assets like images, videos, presentations, infographics etc.
According to Forbes, a stunning 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day. Approximately 60 % of that data is uploaded by people to the Internet, which makes up to 1.5 quintillion bytes of human-generated content every day. And this trend only speeds up.
For enterprises, the quantity of content becomes a bigger challenge all the time: Once content is created it needs to be stored, updated, and of course distributed to the right audience, at the right time.
A special kind of content are assets that are not intended for the public, but rather for employees of the company and other specific stakeholders. Some examples are logos of the company, images of the management or videos about the departments. Naturally, this kind of content usually not utilized by end customers. The target groups are rather employees of the company, agencies or partners. In large companies, the number of these assets can easily reach six figures.
But how to manage the growing number of these assets without going losing the overview?
Network and cloud storage: inflexible and cumbersome
If you have ever tried storing digital assets on a shared drive or within a cloud storage, you probably know about the downsides that occur when quantities of assets grow:
- Assets easily get lost or forgotten in a jungle of folders, files and archives
- It’s hard to keep track if assets are approved and ready to use
- Access control is limited, not easy to set up and administrate
- It’s not possible to set up approval workflows
- Assets get duplicated each time when they are published in another channel (for example on a website)
In general, it creates a lot of extra work for employees to coordinate, maintain and control the assets. At some point, the amount of digital assets gets just too high to manage them and chaos begins to reign.
Intranet - better, but still far from perfect
An intranet is suited a bit better for this purpose. You can have more control over access, content approval processes and internal content distribution. However, digital asset management is still a use case which is not supported by most intranet systems.
What are the cons?
- Intranets are usually focused on document collaboration. Effective sharing of other media files like videos, images, audio files etc. is limited, especially in big quantities and size, and is often based on linked shared drives anyway.
- Intranets often have very limited integration options and are cut off from the part of the web that is available to the general public. If you would like to provide files to people outside your company, you are running into problems. It is usually impossible to serve digital assets from an intranet application to external-facing systems like a corporate website.
- Intranets are lacking sophisticated features for digital asset management. If you only have some dozens of files that are not subject to change, an intranet solution could be sufficient for you. But as soon as the number of files rises or different versions of files come into play, you will quickly reach the limit of the intranet solution.
- Traditional intranet solutions that are not cloud-based are designed to work well with a limited number of users in a set number of locations, depending on employee headcount and office locations. This means that such systems are usually not highly scalable and also lack other advantages of cloud solutions, like nonstop availability and highest security standards.
To sum it up, intranets are in most cases not a feasible tool to manage assets. Especially if you want to deliver your assets to other systems, also externally, intranets are too limited and are not designed to serve assets omnichannel, around the globe, efficiently.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is the future
Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is a remedy for all the pain points listed above, it is designed to distribute digital assets globally, at high speed, also via APIs. You can share all kinds of assets you use in your company: photos, videos, audio files, text documents, spreadsheets, slide decks and many more, internally and externally. It works like a library, giving users quick and easy access to all current and shared assets.
You can also create your own brand portal that provides visitors with detailed information about your brand. With such a portal, you can make the processes around your brand more effective, faster and more cost-efficient. This way the portal ensures brand consistency and your corporate identity. Your DAM system can be easily integrated into the brand portal to give users everything they need in one place.
The benefits of using Brand Portals in your enterprise
Higher Quality
- Your brand and assets are presented consistently and convincingly
- Visitors benefit from a perfect, personalized user experience
- The time-to-market of new projects and campaigns is shorter
- Digital assets can be reused easily
Lower Costs
- Employees' productivity increases due to fast file search and easy collaboration
- Visitors can find the information and files they need on their own
- Collaborating with external service providers such as agencies becomes more efficient and easier
- You manage information and assets centrally and no longer need to keep different sources up-to-date
Minimized Risks
- You avoid that outdated information or files are used, which could damage your brand presence
- Your digital asset management system eliminates licensing issues, such as using photos that were only licensed for a specific time period
- You avoid legal issues by requiring users to accept a file's terms of use before downloading it
Your Tailor-Made Brand Portal from JustRelate
JustRelate can develop your brand portal and digital asset management system on the base of the future-proof content management system Scrivito CMS. The platform is customized to meet your needs. It can be easily integrated into your existing IT landscape and the software you already use.
Do you want to know more about Digital Asset Management?
Check out our solution page and read what JustRelate is offering or schedule a free consultation to speak to our expert.
Stable Brand Consistency Leads to an Average Increase in Sales of
33 %
JustRelate develops personalized brand portal software and DAM systems that offer a wealth of other functions for your portal planning and development.
