How Do You Protect Your Digital Assets: What’s what in Digital Asset Management solutions
Digital Asset Management(DAM) is rapidly gaining recognition as a key component of an enterprise content management strategy. The proliferation of digital assets – in multiple formats – is presenting significant challenges to IT departments as organizations are coming to realize that systems to manage these assets are essential, valuable and a best business practice.
Recognizing this growing need to create, store, retrieve and manage rich media files, DAM solution providers are offering a variety of options to manage digital assets, including installed software managed in-house, hosted solutions managed outside the organization or the best of both worlds – systems that begin as hosted solutions and then, as an organization’s IT infrastructure becomes more sophisticated, can be easily converted to an installed solution.
According to Frost and Sullivan, hosted alternatives are rapidly gaining momentum as the solution of choice for the SMB market over installed systems as users look to best manage their financial and human capital. For some companies, hosted DAM services are an end in themselves – a deployment alternative that avoids a major investment in infrastructure or the addition of IT staff necessary to manage an enterprise DAM system. Hosting alternatives also allow companies to gain critical capabilities quickly, while they are building out their infrastructures or developing a proof of concept to help refine requirements and demonstrate ROI.