Why Digital Asset Management makes sense for most organizations

Proper digital asset management brings immediate and lasting benefits to organizations, small and large.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is just a fancy term that describes:

• Maximizing the benefits and ROI you get from your organization's digital files.
• Increasing production efficiency by minimizing downtime and delays, and
• Saving time and money by avoiding the recreation or re-licensing of lost files.

Imagine DAM in use at your organization.

Most organizations seek DAM systems only after realizing all the time and money they've lost from digital asset mismanagement. Lost files must be reacquired, causing production delays; or files get erroneously released, causing embarrassment, expense reprints, and worse.

The avoidance of these and other situations is the primary point behind digital asset management. Ask yourself how many of the following situations sound familiar:

• You take great pains to secure a client approval, only to have your layout artist use "Logo-Final" when she should have used "Logo-Final2."
• Multiple employees waste time trying to find a missing file. After no success, someone has to recreate the file anyway.
• Designers work on layouts, and then save final files on laptops left in the back of a taxi, or not properly backed up when disaster strikes.

Organizations come up with all sorts of workarounds to avoid traps like these, but workarounds don't always work. Even worse, if a single user doesn't know about one of those workarounds-well, you know the saying about a chain's weakest link.

Your organization's DAM system will be a constant reminder to your team that the files they use are valuable, and the loss or misuse of those files is expensive.

When properly implemented, the minor intrusion of protecting your files will be more than offset by the added value of easily finding and controlling them.

And the cost?

Some DAM systems can be extremely expensive, making it tough to justify their purchase and maintenance costs. But Canto keeps Cumulus affordable, because DAM does no one any good if no one can afford it.

Affordability is just one of the reasons more than 1,150,000 Cumulus user licenses have been distributed, and more than 13,500 Cumulus Servers have been sold.

ROI – Indisputable and significant.

The most demanded ROI for a DAM system falls into three categories:

• Improve operational efficiency/productivity,
• Manage and ensure brand consistency, or
• Improve return on marketing investments.

Though it's tough to measure all benefits derived from a fully featured DAM system, below is a summary of average performance after the first year of DAM use.

And, because the benefits of DAM are accumulative, the years following the first can see exponential ROI increases, as archives mature and users maximize the advantages they offer.

What works best – hosted or local?

Thanks to fantastic Web-based services like email, many are quick to consider hosted software solutions known as "software as a service," or SaaS. Hosted solutions are fine for some uses, but because of security, "always up" access, and other concerns-local DAM solutions like Cumulus can't be beat.

Consider the following before making a DAM decision. 24/7 "always up" access - With hosted solutions, you have to consider Internet connectivity lapses: Is the problem on your end? Your host's end? Connectivity to your assets is connectivity to you productivity too.

When your assets are stored locally, the entire Internet could go down and you'd still be productive. (Perhaps more so!)

Performance - How fast is your office Internet connection now? How fast will it be when designers are downloading 200MB Photoshop files? What about video? If designers have to endure long file downloads, the files chosen for your projects are less likely to be the perfect ones and more likely to be the "quicker" ones.

Cumulus keeps your entire asset collection available at ultra fast speeds, so designers can think about perfection and not stop watches.

Direct application access - Applications like InDesign and QuarkXPress must load files from local and network volumes. And, though some hosted systems trick applications into working properly, imagine the time required to open an InDesign layout that references a few gigabytes of photos that must be downloaded from the Internet each and every time. To avoid delays like these, users will start storing files locally, thereby completely negating the benefits of DAM.

Cumulus enables users to drag and drop files right into their applications. Access is instant, and applications get the file links they require for fast, error-free use.

Hosting company reliability - When using a hosted solution, you need to worry about the health of the company behind the service.

When a SaaS provider fails, what happens to your assets-and your productivity?

Canto has been in business for almost two decades, with no change of ownership. Contrast that to the dozens of SaaS providers that have come and gone in the past few years alone.

What's more, the Canto Partner Network offers worldwide support options in addition to those offered by Canto. So you have choices, many of which are local, and all of which are reliable.

Security - Financial organizations don't trust the Internet because the Internet is insecure. Online banking is available because risk analysis suggests that most accounts won't be breached.

Fidelity Investments, one of the largest investment bankers in the United States states the following on their website: "We will reimburse your Fidelity account for any losses due to unauthorized activity."

Can you expect any SaaS provider to offer better security assurances than Fidelity Investments?

The best you can hope for after an account breach will be some file copies-and maybe an apology. Meanwhile, the breach might benefit your competitors, or compromise the assets one of your high profile customers.

Cumulus relies on four solid stages of diverse, industry-proven security to help ensure protection for Web access-that's probably more security than your bank offers.

Here you can download the complete PDF.