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DAM plus cloud storage. Is it one or the other? Or is it greater than the sum of its parts?  

This article highlights a few key differences between DAM and cloud storage solutions (like Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox). A few items stood out to me to differentiate the two: 

  1. Focus- I love this: “Cloud storage primarily focuses on the user, while a DAM system focuses more on the assets themselves”. With cloud storage, the user defines most of the sharing and rights, naming, etc. but DAM puts the asset at the center: based on data about your assets, the right people automatically have the right access. 
  2. Metadata- With DAM, the structured application of data about your assets allows for more flexibility in searching, greater insights about the assets you actually have (and use), and easier content management. Metadata also allows you to link and relate assets that are otherwise lost to each other, saving time and money to reproduce content you might already have on hand. 
  3. Automation - Because of all that great data applied in a systematic, repeatable way, DAM allows you to integrate your systems to automate tasks throughout an asset’s lifecycle that save time, reduce risk, increase consistency, and ultimately (again), saves money. For any content that needs to be uploaded, downloaded, or moved between systems, automating those processes is a no-brainer.

We use both DAM and a cloud storage solution here at Bynder, and I’d love to hear from you! Are you using cloud storage with your DAM? How do you differentiate usage between the systems? Any best practices to share about using both? 

We’re having this conversation in-house currently along with DAM vs. CMS (i.e. SharePoint) and always having to talk with people how these systems complement each other, not exclude each other. We also find that Cloud and CMS tend to rely so heavily on structure and knowing where something might or should be stored that findability is compromised whereas the DAM taxonomy and tagging really outperforms the other platforms. There’s a place for each type of system with use cases growing as our MarTech stack expands...

Thanks for that, @RPalmer ! Are there any talking points, examples, or proof points that have worked for you to show your stakeholders the differences and benefits of each system? 

We haven’t standardized anything at this point - just me talking more than anything and then demo’ing Bynder to show how it’s set up. Resistance is mostly due to ignorance of what the DAM can do vs. what people have been using in the past (we have a lot of acquisitions), so demo’ing helps a lot. It would be nice to have a DAM vs. CDN or CMS slide from Bynder to throw into the conversation… or a template that we could customize into our tech stack slides...

Thanks @RPalmer ! I’ll see what we have or can pull together for DAM vs. CMS. 

In the meantime, I’ll send over an editable version of our connected ecosystem template. You can plug in the technologies you use to show how they work together with Bynder.

 

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