Scaleflex is an independent software vendor (ISV) in the Akamai Qualified Compute Partner Program.
Managing and delivering content comes with challenges like maintaining consistency, managing vast content libraries, and ensuring timely delivery to your intended audience. Luckily, there’s a way to simplify this complexity and create a seamless content workflow.
The combination of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is improving how businesses handle content. Together, these tools streamline workflows, enhance user experiences, and deliver measurable results. In this blog, we’ll explore the common hurdles businesses face and how a DAM and CDN partnership can help overcome them.
Challenges of content operations and delivery
Among the many challenges we see businesses dealing with, one key issue is maintaining consistent quality across a wide range of content types, including visuals, videos, articles, and social media posts. Ensuring high-quality output requires significant resources, multiple rounds of approval, manual edits, and adherence to brand guidelines.
Another challenge is handling the sheer volume of content. As the need for constant audience engagement grows, businesses must produce and update content quickly. This can strain resources, disrupt internal organization, and ultimately affect content quality and output.
Delivering high-quality content effectively presents its own set of challenges. Content is only effective if it reaches the right audience in the right format at the right time. Slow load times, poor visuals, or platform compatibility issues can harm user experience and engagement. On top of these operational difficulties, businesses must navigate a maze of regulations, including copyright laws, data protection policies, and regional content guidelines. This adds yet another layer of complexity to content creation and distribution.
So, how can businesses tackle these challenges effectively and efficiently?
How a cloud-based DAM and CDN enhances your content strategy
Cloud-based DAM systems are revolutionizing content management by leveraging cloud computing for faster content delivery, seamless upgrades, reduced IT overhead, better scalability, and improved collaboration. This allows businesses to handle traffic spikes, maintain performance, and enable global access, improving remote team collaboration and reducing downtime. Cloud DAM systems offer dynamic scalability, requiring less IT effort and eliminating the need for costly hardware investments, while global server distribution reduces latency and improves load times.
By integrating advanced cloud compute technology, a cloud-based DAM combined with CDN can optimize care for content, from organization and indexing to transformations for a wide variety of devices and webpages. Premium cloud solutions provide reliable content delivery, protecting assets and mitigating data loss, ensuring smooth operations, and uninterrupted business performance.
By managing visual assets from start to finish, these tools support online businesses by streamlining both content operations and delivery. Here’s how it works:
Streamline content management with a DAM
A DAM system acts as a centralized hub for storing, organizing, and managing all digital assets (images, videos, documents, etc.). It serves as a single source of truth, ensuring content is easily accessible, consistently updated, and aligned with brand standards. By using a DAM, businesses can reduce errors, prevent redundancies, and streamline content creation.
Faster, more reliable delivery with a CDN
On the delivery side, a CDN optimizes content delivery by distributing content across a global network of servers, caching assets locally, and routing traffic for faster load times. A CDN not only improves website performance but also supports dynamic content adjustments, like resizing or reformatting visuals on the fly to meet the requirements of different devices and platforms. This minimizes latency and allows content to be delivered quickly and reliably, regardless of the user’s location. This optimization enhances user experience, leading to higher engagement and increased conversions.
Enhanced compliance and security
Together, DAM and CDN solutions address content management and delivery, but they are also vital tools for managing compliance. These tools offer permissions management, asset usage tracking, and detailed audit trails. They enable authorized users to access or distribute assets. In addition, a CDN protects content delivery from threats like DDoS attacks, while a DAM enhances asset data with encryption and access controls. This dual-layered approach not only secures operations but also builds trust with users. Implementing both solutions helps businesses improve resource management, accelerate time-to-delivery, and create a consistent, high-performing online presence.
Who can benefit from combining cloud-based DAM & CDN?
Combining a DAM system with a CDN is ideal if you have extensive content operations. We often see businesses such as marketing agencies, media companies, e-commerce platforms, and global enterprises leverage these tools when they need to move away from complexities in their content operations. These organizations need efficient storage, organization, and distribution of large volumes of digital assets.
Digital leaders, marketers, content creators, and IT managers require streamlined workflows, consistent branding, and secure access to assets in order to effectively collaborate and be productive. Automation can further reduce design costs, minimize the need for design briefs, and reduce manual content operations by 90%. IT teams will also appreciate improved security, scalability, and reduced infrastructure demands, allowing them to focus on strategic tasks rather than managing technical issues for digital and marketing departments.
Use cases and examples
Let’s dive into some real-life examples of companies already implementing this dual solution.
Innocean, a major advertising and communication firm, initially integrated Scaleflex’s DAM to support a team of 200 users managing high-volume digital campaigns. Within just 12 weeks, the user base doubled, showing the growing internal demand for a flexible and centralized solution. Since the launch, Innocean has optimized over 4 TB of assets, with that volume increasing by 1.5 times as deployment progressed. The company benefits from simplified asset organization, rapid localization, and optimized delivery speed across global markets.
Grupo Piñero is a tourism company that offers a range of services including a travel agency branch, hotels, and transportation services. As a leader in the tourism industry, the company manages enormous volumes of content daily to effectively communicate the value of their services to diverse markets around the world. Recognizing the challenges of managing such high volumes of content while maintaining speed and quality, Grupo Piñero leveraged Scaleflex’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) in combination with Akamai Image Manager and CDN. Thanks to this combination, the group was able to deliver a localized experience to its markets, save time and resources, propose customized, 3-second video previews for their site, and accelerate time-to-market!
Costa Coffee had relied on their CMS as a makeshift DAM for some time, but eventually the limitations of this system were getting in the way of their content operations. They needed a solution that would be capable of offering metadata enrichment, intelligent searches, user management, and content customization. Seeking a more robust and customizable solution, they turned to Scaleflex’s DAM, a natural choice given their longstanding relationship with Akamai. The Scaleflex DAM not only addressed their content management challenges but also integrated seamlessly with Akamai’s CDN, providing a highly efficient and cohesive system to support their marketing efforts.
These stories of Innocean, Grupo Piñero, and Costa Coffee demonstrate the transformative power of integrating Scaleflex’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) with Akamai’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to address unique content management challenges across industries. Despite their diverse needs, ranging from managing high-volume advertising campaigns to optimizing tourism services and organizing marketing campaigns, each company faced a shared challenge: the inefficiency of traditional content management systems in a digital-first, globalized world.
Ready to streamline your content operations and deliver exceptional experiences at scale? Discover how Scaleflex’s DAM and Akamai’s CDN can transform your content strategy, optimize workflows, and accelerate your time-to-market. Whether you’re managing global campaigns, delivering localized content, or organizing complex digital assets, our integrated solutions are designed to meet your needs.
Contact Scaleflex (sales@scaleflex.com) or Akamai (technologypartners@akamai.com) today to learn how we can help you unlock the full potential of your content and take your business to the next level!
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