Digital Asset Management Cloud Platform

Four advantages of cloud Digital Asset Management (DAM)

What is DAM?

This blog post outlines the four main benefits of hosting a Digital Asset Management (DAM) business in the cloud. In order to shed light on why the cloud is the perfect fit for a DAM company, we will start with an overview of the nature of the DAM industry.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a system that enables the management and retrieval of media assets. It allows for simplifying the organization and storage of digital content including images, photos, graphics, video, audio, documents, etc. This is vital for maintaining an efficient production environment. Essentially, it is a marketing technology tool that allows organisations and businesses to connect their digital assets with customers.

The DAM industry

With the rapid growth of digitalization, the DAM industry is expanding at an equally fast pace. Brands worldwide are expected to constantly deliver high-quality content as stakeholders are looking for information exclusively online. Today, creative teams are not the only professionals who should know how to manage digital assets. Digital marketers, brand managers, website editors, and many other specialists must be proficient with the management of the continuously growing volume and velocity of digital assets.

In addition, DAM offers numerous advantages such as cost and time efficiency, data security, brand identity control, improved knowledge management and many more. It is certain that as the DAM’s added value increases, the need for DAM services will only continue to expand. Consequently, DAM companies will be facing tough competition in their efforts to stand out.

DAM cloud infrastructure challenges and requirements

There is no doubt that fast “anywhere” access to digital content is what today’s mobile employees and company clients demand. In order to deliver the high-quality service the market requires, DAM companies must make the important decision of what type of infrastructure will best suit the unique needs of their solutions. The specifics of the DAM industry require a high-performing, scalable and extremely flexible infrastructure.

Taking into consideration the competitive nature of the DAM industry and the specifics of its IT infrastructure, DAM providers are facing several challenges when deciding where to host their services. First and foremost, DAM solutions require a high-performance infrastructure that can be scaled up quickly and cost efficiently. Another component that DAM companies, as production services facing customers,  should look out for is dynamic and knowledgeable customer support. As a SaaS solution, DAM should also be hosted on an extremely reliable and interoperable infrastructure. Finally, a successful DAM infrastructure should be very flexible in order to accommodate the variety of clients DAM companies tend to service.

DAM Infrastructure Meme

The benefits of the cloud & CloudSigma’s solution

Performance & Scalability
“We had to deploy our own object storage service and during the benchmarking phase we were quite impressed with how fast we can actually store any of the files on your storage system.”Daniel Gavrila, Infrastructure engineer @ Figshare.

A DAM service is designed around a hardware and networking infrastructure for efficiently storing and rapidly transmitting a huge amount of different types of files. This means that a cloud deployment allows the scalability and resilience that is very difficult to achieve with on-premises systems. Cloud-based DAM companies can scale up quickly to match the individual needs of their customers. On the other hand, an on-prem solution requires spending significant time and resources. Further, the cloud allows for immediate resources provisioning as there is no wait time and businesses can instantly spin up additional servers whenever needed.

“We are in a constant process of innovating our software solutions, so a main challenge for us is to be able to scale easily and add resources on demand for an affordable price. One of our multi-tenant portals is currently hosted at another cloud provider, but CloudSigma’s price-performance ratio is simply far more attractive.”Simon Tietze, Senior Data Scientist @ BEN Energy.

CloudSigma is the perfect partner for DAM providers because the platform allows for mixing and matching all SSD and magnetic storage with our cloud servers.  With CloudSigma, companies have the freedom to scale up or down according to their specific needs. Thus, they can achieve a superior performance level than what in-house infrastructure or other cloud providers are able to offer.

Another benefit of cloud DAM companies is that utilizing the cloud can result in new business models that generate innovative digital experiences. As a result, firms acquire new revenue streams and increase their profits.

Flexibility & Cost-efficiency

A huge benefit that the cloud can give to DAM providers is the ability to purchase only the required resources. In the cloud, companies can stop paying for unused hardware and enjoy transparent and flexible pay-per-use billing. This makes cloud-based DAM adjustable. In the cloud, businesses can easily modify the storage, reflecting the current growth they are experiencing, without any interruption.

What makes CloudSigma’s solution unique is the flexibility of its pricing models. With CloudSigma, companies can combine long-term subscriptions for predictable workloads with on-demand scalability for unplanned capacity. By paying for only what they need, our customers achieve a best in industry price-performance ratio.

Dynamic and Knowledgeable Customer Support

A cloud-hosted DAM solution also allows for addressing software bugs and other issues very quickly. DAM companies offer a service that faces customers who often experience maintenance issues, needs for upgrades and other technical issues. With the cloud, DAM providers wouldn’t need to worry about the hassle of such interruptions. The cloud vendor takes care of those issues. This makes a cloud solution extremely convenient.

DAM companies in the cloud can be sure that their IT teams will receive support every step of the way. The provider will assist in setting up the cloud infrastructure and solving any implementation or maintenance issues. Companies can rely on an experienced IaaS partner and focus on their own core activities.

“CloudSigma’s team assisted us throughout the process and everything went quite smoothly. I was very pleased to see such personal attitude towards our business case.”Cameron Worts, Managing Director @ Perth Web Hosting.

A key differentiator of CloudSigma’s service is our unprecedented customer support. CloudSigma offers free 24/7 live chat and email ticketing support from technically trained teams. With us, each customer gets a dedicated account manager as a single point of contact. CloudSigma prides itself in providing a very active communication which allows for an easy knowledge transfer and a more optimized setup.

Reliability, Accessibility and Interoperability

Another advantage for cloud-based DAM companies is that the cloud offers an easy transition during the deployment process. With the right cloud service provider that delivers support and guidance along the way, migration to the cloud is a very easy process. Using the cloud leads to quicker and more predictive time to market. Companies are able to deliver results faster, cheaper and with more quality.

“It was quite easy, we could actually replicate most of the AWS infrastructure services into CloudSigma in a matter of minutes.”Daniel Gavrila, Infrastructure engineer @ Figshare.

CloudSigma’s solution is perfect for DAM providers because it guarantees 100% availability of virtual servers. Our network is backed by strict SLA and full hardware & network redundancy. In addition, any x86 OS or application can run in our cloud unmodified. Our seamless live migration tool gets businesses up and running in the cloud without any modifications to their existing infrastructure.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that cloud computing provides great benefits to DAM systems. Overall, it ensures that DAM providers can dedicate enough time and staff resources to concentrate on delivering a competitive, high-quality service. Hence, they can continue to expand and innovate in the field.

Did you know that CloudSigma has extensive experience in supporting DAM providers? Take a look at our customer success stories with Swiss DAM software company Picturepark and Data Management provider for academic institutions Figshare to learn more about how CloudSigma’s clients stay ahead of the competition with the help of our easily scalable and cost-effective cloud solution.

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About Zhenya Mocheva

Zhenya is a Digital Marketing Expert at CloudSigma, focusing on brand strategy, social media marketing and digital marketing campaigns. She is passionate about the continuous innovation within the digital environment and the endless growth opportunities that inbound marketing brings.