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Network storage infrastructure is under increasing pressure to accommodate exponential growth in organizational data. Accelerating use of multimedia-heavy content for everyday corporate work is challenging companies of all sizes to ensure they have enough space to store it all. Because throwing more drives at the problem can be reactive, expensive, and ultimately inefficient, DAM (Digital Asset Management) has emerged as a more intelligent solution.

At its core, DAM involves the intake, tagging, cataloging, storage, and retrieval of an organization’s digital assets, which can include anything from business files created in productivity applications to audio- and video-based content. Unmanaged storage impacts an organization in several ways, including:

Cost. Duplicate files saved across the network eat up finite drive space. Companies often overspend on storage infrastructure to compensate, a stopgap solution that only increases operational costs.

Productivity. End users searching endlessly for materials drive up project and ongoing costs and stretch out timelines.

Risk. Inconsistent use of data assets can compromise branding, decision-making, and regulatory compliance. It’s virtually impossible to have a single version of the truth across the organization when everyone works off of disparate bits of information.

Stressed Infrastructure

Without any proactive storage management in place, the environment can quickly become chaotic. When the data skews toward large media files, the results are even uglier.

“DAM can alleviate strains on existing infrastructures by helping to eliminate storage costs from redundant sets of asset libraries in different locations and by keeping all assets and versions in one master library,” says Widen Enterprises (www.widen.com) CEO Matthew Gonnering. “Multiple copies of a file in multiple locations use even more storage,” which can make version control that much more difficult, as it requires someone to remember each file’s location and then update or renew it should a new one become available or it expires.

Understanding the challenge is one thing. Cost-justifying the solution is another. Seth Earley, president of Earley & Associates (www.earley.com), says inconsistent behaviors lie at the root of the problem.

“The business case for DAM is asset reuse,” says Earley. “There are many challenges to doing so in large organizations. In many situations, people store these types of files on a shared network drive but little thought is given to how to organize and retrieve those assets.”

Better Storage Equals Better Business

As beneficial as DAM is to improving storage efficiency, Thomas Vernersson, president of storage management software vendor Northern (www.northern.net), says the real story lies in data availability in today’s increasingly distributed and collaborative work environments.

“Efficient digital asset management assures that business-critical data is available when needed; that data is streamlined to facilitate efficient, low-impact, timely backups; and that storage devices are kept from filling up,” says Vernersson. “This allows organizations to defer new hardware purchases.”

For all its promise, however, DAM is no magic bullet. Art Powell, president of Trinsic Technologies (www.trinsictech.com), says it may motivate the wrong kinds of behaviors.

“DAM is good for companies that have lots of files, such as images and PDF files, and want a way to catalog what they have for search and retrieval,” says Powell. “However, it’s not necessarily an efficient way to contain storage growth as it can actually encourage users to store everything. If a company is looking for ways to control storage growth, there are much better ways to accomplish this through network policies and implementations.”

Beyond Technology

Powell adds that company-wide policies should outline user responsibilities, possibly defining personal photos and music files, for example, as unacceptable.

“By having the community or firm working in a common data environment, the resulting IT support costs can be dramatically lower,” says Tracy Rosen, principal of the WH Group (www.whgroup.us). “Savings are achieved in time, continuity, and money by using a standard method of creating, reviewing, modifying, and publishing a given set of assets. The advantages are speed of asset utilization and reduction in all costs associated with the asset life cycle.”

Organizations interested in implementing DAM must first listen to the leaders and workers who will be most affected by the change.

“One size does not fit all, and feature sets need to be prioritized by actual business need,” says Frank Morris, sector champion of digital technology and content with UK Trade & Investment, adding companies often need to balance the need to centralize repositories with redundancy and distributed availability.

Eye-Opening Cost Benefits

The bottom-line results can be significant, and they’re not limited to static data, either. When applied to redundant software installations, companies can realize major savings here, too.

“In our experience, companies can save anywhere from 20 to 30% on their software bill,” says Ron Halversen, VP of marketing for TriActive (www.systemsmanagementondemand.com), adding the benefits also include 30 to 70% savings in IT costs due to streamlined support requirements. “You can do more with less, and it frees up your time so your IT department can focus on things that add more value to your company.”

As hosted DAM solutions gain momentum, more organizations can take advantage of a more proactive data management maturity without incurring significant upfront capital expense.

“There is a tremendous amount of opportunity to consolidate repositories, provide secure, global access to assets and automate manual processes through DAM,” says Tony Bailey, who leads Acquity Group’s (www.acquitysolutions.com) Content Management team, adding that many of his firm’s manufacturing and distribution clients are already using DAM to automate digital asset distribution to their suppliers and distributors. “It has allowed their marketing teams to focus on higher-value activities and less on mundane and cumbersome click, copy, and ship processes.”

Which points toward a bright future for a technology just now reaching its stride.

“DAM is a great way to aggregate assets and make [them] available in a controlled, cost-effective way to highly fragmented and distributed users,” says WH Group’s Rosen. “If you are clear in your objectives and manage the execution, the potential payback is terrific.”