*Note: this is the 4th post in our series on thriving in the content tornado. Previous posts focused on:
1. The content tornado
2. Gaining adoption for solutions
3. The folly of trying to centralize all your content in one place–and what to do instead
If you’re managing content on premise, you’re making a lot of compromises.
In any large organization there’s a lot of demand for the services a Digital Asset Management system provides, for example:
- Generating many renditions, transformations, and formats of images for different users, ie Content Transformation Services
- Making large volumes of content available in an instant to teams collaborating around the globe
- Transcoding video
- Distributing content to many different channels
With an on-premise approach, you have to worry about overloading the system, slowing down the interface for thousands of users when it’s too busy transcoding video, overwhelming storage capacity, and blowing out your bandwidth, slowing down collaboration and distribution in a just-in-time world.
And the system also imposes unwanted demands on its users – it’s a huge pain to describe content thoroughly when you upload it.
Fortunately, putting these services in the cloud can make them much more effective, and reduce the demands they impose.
A system that’s properly designed to take advantage of cloud services like transcoding, or scaling up compute and storage in an instant, means that you stop designing a system around technology constraints and start designing it around people, and the way we want to work.
For example, you can offload video processing so it can run in the background, without slowing everyone down or making the person who requested it stare at a spinning beach ball. And you can automatically create renditions and make them available to everyone immediately.
And with the cloud you can get much richer descriptions of your content so it’s easier to find and reuse.
For example, if you’re tagging all your content manually, you’re limited by resources and the incentives of a different department or user who may not care or have time to provide a full description of what they are uploading. And they probably don’t know all the other languages your users might search in, or the different vocabularies other departments use to describe the same thing.
With automatic tagging based on artificial intelligence, your content is easily labelled with keywords that extract text, emotions, landmarks, logos, and more. You can’t do that without cloud services
The good news is that people are really catching on to the value of cloud services – research by Forrester Consulting shows that it’s now the most important dimension that buyers of digital content technologies look for from vendors to drive their success.
In my next post in the series I’ll walk through a customer example showing how a Digital Asset Management system can help reduce costs and boost productivity.