What is digital asset management

Digital asset management (DAM) is a system that helps teams organize their resources efficiently. By providing a centralized repository for all digital content, a DAM makes it easy to find, access, and distribute information across teams and departments.

In many companies, workers spend hours producing content that can be hard to find later on. As a result, colleagues end up recreating documents that already exist, missing opportunities to reuse valuable resources.

By properly managing digital assets with DAM software, you can streamline your business workflows, cut down on unnecessary work, and help teams find what they need faster — saving time and getting more value from content. 

To help you build a reliable online ecosystem for your content, let’s review how a DAM works, its benefits, and key capabilities.

Digital asset management definition

Digital asset management is the systematic process of storing, managing, organizing, distributing, and retrieving your organization’s digital content to meet your business needs. Your assets can include any type of document, including text-based files and presentations, as well as rich media files like images, videos, audio content, animations, and graphics.

With the right platform, teams can leverage AI-generated metadata to search for digital assets. Assets can then be shared with users both within and outside an organization, have multiple levels of file and folder permissions, and serve various purposes. For example:

• A marketing team produces videos, copy, and images for different campaigns
• Sales creates contracts to close deals
• HR uses digital files and other documents to onboard and train new hires

Asset management solutions provide the technology your team needs to store, organize, distribute, and retrieve your organization’s content in a single controlled environment. Using a DAM streamlines workflows and helps your team save many hours while sharing, collaborating, and searching for documents.

DAM evolution over time

Just like every other business process, digital asset management has gone through many changes, from the invention of the first business computer to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in computing.

Here is a brief history of DAM evolution.

DAM before the internet

Originally, the invention of desktop computers and on-prem libraries for asset management allowed businesses to move physical assets to digital formats. This technology helped store files and documents using simple metadata and indexing in folders. Digitization made business asset management easier, but sharing these assets with others was still difficult.

DAM after the invention of the internet

The internet made it easier for enterprises to share files internally and with stakeholders. While this solved the problem of sharing, the process generally involved countless emails and FTP apps, and file access was not secure.

DAM in the cloud-computing age

With the evolution of cloud technology, teams could easily store and share assets across departments and organizations. Secure collaboration became simpler, and team members could work from different devices and locations, saving time while eliminating the headache of inefficient emails.

DAM in the API age

Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable digital asset management integrations with other file creation and collaboration solutions. These integrations reduce the need to switch between tools and help teams create media files quickly and efficiently.

DAM in the AI age

When powered by AI, solutions in digital asset management offer intelligent document processing, rich media recognition like video and voice recognition, and asset cross-referencing. AI-powered DAM can also provide recommendations to make content creation and distribution faster and smarter, helping your teams save time and work more efficiently.

How DAM software works

Digital asset management software helps your organization manage your data lifecycle, from creation to storage and sharing. It typically involves these six key steps.

1. Digital asset creation

DAM solutions often come with built-in templates and integrate with secure collaboration tools to create standardized and searchable assets without forcing the user to move from one application window to another.

2. Digital asset storage

With centralized asset management, you maintain a single source of truth for your content. DAM systems provide secure storage for different file types and online backup to make sure you don’t lose any resources.

3. Digital asset organization and indexing

Digital asset management solutions use metadata to make it simple to find stored assets when you need them. Advanced solutions automatically attach metadata to digital assets in order to group and index them in the system for easy search and retrieval. Metadata may include the following information:

• Asset types, such as social media content or product specs
• Version, such as whether a document is new or revised
• Media types, such as JPEG, video, or slideshow
• Software or technology used to create it, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word

4. Digital asset collaboration

DAM solutions include features like comments and tagging to facilitate collaboration among your team members on the same document, file, or asset, regardless of the media type.

For example, document version control helps ensure that team members only receive the latest version of each asset, so no one works with an outdated file or shares incorrect information from an old document.

With a platform for digital asset management, you gain history and access records for effective system auditing. You can leverage document audit trails to demonstrate compliance with privacy regulations in industries like healthcare and finance.

5. Digital asset distribution

The best DAM platforms make it easy to share the latest version of your assets with others using link sharing best practices. You can also embed assets directly on your website to share the latest version every time.

6. Access control and permission governance

DAM systems allow admins to decide who has access to what file and for what purpose. For example, you can restrict access to view only, edit, download, or a combination of these permissions.  Additionally, by using links with expiration dates, you can revoke permissions anytime.

Benefits of digital asset management solutions

Using software for managing DAM assets saves teams valuable time when closing deals, engaging with customers, and launching marketing campaigns – and that’s just the beginning.

Here are seven advantages of digital asset management solutions for your business.

1. Quick document search and retrieval

Because a digital asset management system uses metadata to index and group files, it’s easy to search and find them when needed. It means your team members will spend less time searching for documents and files and more time getting useful work done.

This ease of finding content also helps reduce costs by eliminating duplicated documents or the recreation of ones that you can’t locate within your cloud storage platform.

2. Simple and streamlined workflows

Managing digital assets simplifies workflows by minimizing time spent searching for documents, making it easier to share them and ensuring secure collaboration. A simplified process also increases transparency across your organization and eliminates bottlenecks in file sharing.

3. More effective teamwork

When your team members know where to find documents when they need them, they can work faster and focus on closing more deals instead of spending time chasing down documents and files. A DAM solution that increases efficiency leads to more effective teamwork and progress for your organization.

4. Improved brand guideline compliance

To increase sales and enhance customer experience, you need effective brand management. A digital asset management system helps ensure the current documents are available for your team to use. It means your marketing, sales, and customer support communication are always up to date and on brand.

5. Stronger security

Advanced solutions for media asset management provide security features like password protection and granular access controls that restrict access to your asset library.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of data breaches in 2024 reached $4.88M — a 10% increase over 2023 and the highest total ever. These measures help reduce data breaches and unauthorized access.

6. Faster and increased conversion

If your marketing and sales teams can easily find and share content with prospective customers, they can help convert prospects more quickly (instead of spending hours chasing down documents).

Increased conversion and more customers mean higher revenue and an improved bottom line for your brand.

7. Easier regulatory compliance

Since DAM platforms provide access history, version control, and granular access permissions, highly regulated industries like healthcare and fintech can easily comply with regulations.

Access permissions help ensure control over access to your organization’s digital asset management library and avoid penalties for violating data privacy regulations. File encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and other secure sharing features strengthen security while supporting industry compliance requirements.

Common challenges when managing digital assets

Managing assets without DAM software can pose challenges to organizations of all sizes.

1. Difficulty accessing digital assets: An asset management solution offers robust metadata capabilities and tools for searching and previewing media assets. Without it, your team may struggle to locate files, delay critical decisions, slow customer progress through your funnel, and hinder deal closures.
2. Waste of time and resources: A Gartner survey found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs effectively. If your team members have to recreate lost files, they’re wasting time that could be better spent on other activities.
3. Disconnected information silos: If you don’t have a DAM system to store and access all digital assets, different teams and departments will end up storing their files and documents in separate, non-integrable storage locations. This disconnect creates significant barriers to effective team communication and collaboration.
4. No single source of truth on business content: Without a unified repository for all your organization’s digital assets, you may have duplicate documents in different storage locations. This fragmentation leads to conflicting business information, off-brand communication, and uncontrolled access to your files.

What to look for in a DAM platform

Choosing the best media asset management platform for your company depends on your business needs, implementation goals, the size of your teams, the types of assets you create, and the regulations in your industry.

When choosing DAM software for your business, look for these features and capabilities.

• Full lifecycle asset support: Moving files from one application to another could jeopardize their security and integrity, so having a single location for creating, editing, and sharing assets is ideal
• Scalable cloud storage: A reliable solution should securely store your DAM assets with backups, scaling to your needs while offering flexibility and optimal storage performance
• Robust searchability: Your DAM software should offer search functionalities that enable you to index and easily search for files using AI-generated metadata
• Fast file transfer: Your platform should allow you to transfer documents quickly so they are available when customers and stakeholders need information to make decisions
• Permission control: This featureallows you to control who has access to which document, for what reason, and for how long, ensuring the integrity and security of your information
• Seamless integration with existing tools: Solutions with easy integrations help teams collaborate on files and work seamlessly with any other content management software and publishing platforms you use to share content with external stakeholders
• Easy data import and export: If you decide to switch the tools or solutions used to manage your digital assets, your DAM system should simplify the process of importing and exporting data and documents

Use Box for digital asset management to enhance collaboration and security

Box is the leading Intelligent Content Management platform, a secure solution for creating content, storing, sharing, and managing your digital assets in one place. 

With a digital asset library, you can organize your documents and media files to make content easily accessible whenever you need it. Box also allows you to keep track of the complete lifecycle of your assets from anywhere and on any device. 

You also get security and compliance features like granular access control and encryption — protecting your sensitive information while meeting specific industry regulations. Plus, by integrating Box with +1,500 applications, you streamline workflows and unify your favorite tools, boosting productivity across business operations

Contact us and discover all you can do with Box for digital asset management.

*While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blog post is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.