The choice between Digital Asset Management and FTP is of major importance in outlining your own File Sharing strategy. Each Company is already required to manage both documents and multimedia files of various types and formats.
Over the years FTP has always been the most popular and economical tool for sharing files. In the meantime other tools (we transfert, dropbox etc.) for transfer purposes have become widespread and are targeted to speed up operations. Regardless of this and as time passed and the development of new technologies, new requirements arose related to file management.
File sharing - the new requirements
At present, new requirements are being expressed by Companies that cannot be fully met with by a simple FTP. In particular it is of major importance in managing files to consider the increasing complexity of a Company's organization and the increasing importance of the time factor during which teams have to deliver and receive files. Thus for an efficient collaboration it is mandatory to have a system available that enables loading easily, indexing, recovering and sharing files safely.
The Benefits of Digital Asset Management
Usability and ease-in-use
When a Company decides to use a dedicated FTP, the learning curve may be steep. In most cases Companies may engage one person to supervise organization and manage maintenance. On the contrary, Digital Asset Management in cloud, equipped with file sharing functionalities, requires no additional hardware implementation.
Security
An important issue to consider is that while sharing files via FTP, there are no supplementary safety measures for critical Company files. A large number of cloud providers operate according to the highest security standards. Ensured with the various existing security levels, including protection with passwords and cryptography, Company teams may be sure that sensitive company information will be protected. Cloud solutions such as DAM offer companies a simple method for managing access to the platform in a secure manner by further creating different file access levels.
Accessibility
As Companies have already become global and teams are always mobile, it is of major importance that accessing files at any time or place. Web based services enable recovering files via almost any browser or on any computer or mobile device. They do not require any additional hardware or installation software to enable immediate data access from any location.
Managing files
Digital Asset Management enables cataloging various multimedia files via categories, playlists, ingesting tags and descriptions and utilizing advanced research engines.
Granular access management
Unlike the FTP, Digital Asset Management can easily manage permissions for accessing portals with various user levels of the platform. In this way the Digital Asset Management is able to provide the Content Provider, Editor, Validator, Editor, etc. Each user profile may have the availability of updating, uploading and deleting or not deleting files. The files can be shared and broadcasted immediately onto various platforms.
Sharing and re-using multimedia assets
Each Company often has to share files with clients or suppliers or even with other branches, all within a short enough time, sharing files in real time both to be seen as well as downloaded and then broadcasted. Often for more complicated projects (web tv, media galleries, Magazine, Ketchup TV) it is necessary to synchronize the File Sharing system with the broadcasting system to automate the whole media delivery process. Digital Asset Management enables setting up broadcasting onto any type of site or web TV.
It is lastly of major importance to consider that Digital Asset Management enables overcoming any problem arising from the sizes of the files. In fact often multimedia files are very large and this may cause a large number of difficulties in storing, managing and sharing files. In addition, during back-up processes it is important to use tools that enable synchronization of all the resources and facilitate managing the virtualization process and file copying.
