How Digital Asset Management and Blockchain are Revolutionizing Business Operations

Digitization has become ubiquitous. Almost all assets that businesses routinely interact with are either becoming digital or are enhanced by the advances in big data technologies and analytics. Interestingly, the last couple of years has seen a rise in the importance of digital assets across industries such as banking, finance, healthcare, education, publishing, mining, and energy, to name a few. With the increasing importance of digital assets, it is important to manage them efficiently. However, the ever-changing customer expectations and market environment are transforming the way asset management and its operations are carried out. This transformation is pushing businesses to modernize their communication systems and processes, enabling ease of asset access across channels.

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a system or software that helps organizations store, organize, manage, retrieve, and distribute digital assets such as images, videos, documents, and other media files. These assets are central to a company’s operations, marketing, and branding efforts, and a DAM system ensures they are easily accessible, secure, and properly utilized. By providing a centralized repository, DAM allows for streamlined workflows, better collaboration, and the ability to repurpose assets efficiently across different channels. As businesses continue to produce and rely on vast amounts of digital content, the role of DAM becomes increasingly critical in maintaining brand consistency, optimizing resource use, and protecting intellectual property.

The Significance of Digital Asset Management

In today’s digitized world, data, systems, and applications are the most critical assets of the organization. The importance and sensitivity levels of these digital assets, however, vary widely across sectors. For example, in hospitals, the most sensitive asset is the patient information that resides on the hospital systems, whereas the most critical assets for financial organizations are their digital transactions. Attacks on these digital assets can lead to huge damages to the business. Therefore, businesses need to have an effective, clearly outlined Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategy to analyze and protect their digital assets.

As companies continue to digitally transform, the requirement of an effective DAM strategy becomes even more important. Companies must determine a cost-effective way to seamlessly store, organize, find, retrieve, and distribute assets while ensuring the highest level of security. A sound digital asset management strategy ensures the central accessibility, speedy retrieval, and security of the organization’s ever-growing assets. A leading research and market report state that the size of the Digital Asset Management Market is projected to grow from USD $2.44 billion in 2017 to USD $5.66 billion by 2022, at an expected CAGR of 18.3%. Technavio’s market research also predicts that the global digital asset management Market will grow exponentially at a CAGR of around 21% by 2020. These significant figures underscore the growing importance of digital asset management as organizations become increasingly dependent to make sense of the ever-growing volumes of both structured and unstructured data.

Why should Companies Go-ahead with it?

Asset Managers employ digital asset management to channel key asset processes and turn data into actionable insights, resulting in better business outcomes.

Digital Asset Management:

• Ensures the proper storage of data assets
• Enables the accelerated creation of data assets
• Enables the easy storage, search, and distribution of assets, across multiple channels
• Enables increased control and protection of data assets
• Accelerates production and delivery timelines
• Facilitates the management of digital asset license agreements
• Significantly reduces the risk of liability from expired asset licenses
• Eases asset distribution across channels, resulting in increased time efficiency

DAMs have evolved significantly and now, in many cases, define a unique way to bridge the gap between the digital assets and the enterprise or industry expectations. This is where Blockchain comes in.

Blockchain and the Future of Digital Asset Management

The value and importance of digital assets have risen dramatically over the last few years. The question is how to manage these assets in the most advantageous way.

The Blockchain is a secure, decentralized, and distributed ledger system that sets up manages and invests in digital asset management strategies in a decentralized manner. The asset management strategy helps businesses record transactions when the assets travel across numerous network systems. They carry Intellectual property ownership, attribution, and many other features with them during every transaction. Blockchain technology protects the transfer of the ownership of digital assets and also protects the assets from misuse by checking their integrity and identifying people who are using them. According to Don and Alex, Blockchain geeks, “Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”

Because of its capabilities, blockchain should be an integral component of every digital asset management strategy. The inclusion of blockchain in the digital Asset Management Strategy is of particular importance for organizations that deal with high-security data or for large corporations that run on their own validation networks. Organizations, therefore, need the help of blockchain service providers to build a sound business case for their DAM solution. Although the number of blockchain service providers is limited, identifying and engaging with one will ensure the development of a secure, robust digital asset management strategy.