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No, we’re not suggesting that DAM systems are actually including toasting functions.
But if you’ve ever had a sudden panic about leaving the gas on in your kitchen, we’re sorry to be the ones to break it to you that failing to perform routine technical maintenance on your DAM system may have equally explosive results.
That’s why Freedom has recently launched a Managed Services offering to provide proactive maintenance as well as reactive support for leading DAM systems. You can read more about the basic offering here, but in this blog post we’ll provide just a few tasks that your technical support staff should be performing on a regular basis:
Patching:
This is one of the most important parts of maintaining your DAM application. Most enterprise software vendors release fixes and patches on a frequent basis along with more formal service packs and upgrades on a regular cadence. These releases include bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature enhancements. Staying current with minor upgrades helps with overall system performance and ensures a smooth upgrade path when you’re ready for it. Freedom’s Managed Services offering automates patching with releases to pre-production environment shortly after the patch becomes available and promoting it to production several weeks afterwards. Because we have multiple clients receiving patches you get the additional testing and peace of mind that the patch has been thoroughly vetted for your application.
Backups:
Your DAM represents the summation of the creative content for your company and the means by which you distribute it. If you are skipping your due diligence in backups and have a system failure, years worth of work may be lost. By their nature, DAM systems use a lot of storage and backups can be expensive—particularly if you haven’t planned for an incremental solution and cheaper storage hardware for the backups to reside on. Freedom has optimized large-scale backups for many clients and can ensure your DAM never suffers catastrophic data loss.
Monitoring:
Every enterprise software application needs automated monitoring, and most IT staffs leverage at least one solution. But whereas website uptime and basic hardware thresholds are ubiquitous, DAM systems come with their own set of performance metrics for monitoring--typically more focused on disk I/O and other bottlenecks associated with large-scale storage. And particular DAM systems come with their own thresholds, which is part of the reason Freedom has developed and launched an application-specific monitoring solution for one of the leading DAM systems on the market, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. More on Freedom's monitoring solution can be found here.
Patching, backups, and monitoring are just the tip of the iceberg. Or tip of the iceberg lettuce to take us back to our original kitchen metaphor. If you're worried you've left the gas on in your DAM, please reach out to discuss how Freedom can help you in avoiding an explosion.
Please Help Me Avoid an Explosion!
Or at least talk me through my options--how big an explosion are we talking about?