While many organizations feel that they’re equipped to support remote work, a report from Upwork found that only 43% of companies actually have a remote work policy in place. This can be due to a number of factors including security, technical infrastructure, and more, but, as these barriers decrease, more and more organizations are considering transitioning to a remote workforce.

As these organizations provide more employees with the flexibility to work from home, cloud-based solutions become critical to ensure collaboration remains high. Arguably one of the most critical solutions – especially for marketing and creative teams – is a digital asset management system (DAM).

What is a DAM?

A digital asset management system (DAM for short) helps companies manage, organize, share, and distribute their digital assets from within one central library. It improves the productivity of marketing teams and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. While almost any digital file can be managed within a DAM, the most common digital formats include photos, videos, documents, design files, and audio files.

How Can a DAM Support Remote Teams?

A DAM can support remote teams by offering many different benefits including:

1. Remote access to assets,
2. Easy transfer of projects, and
3. Improved communication.

Here we will dive into each of these 3 benefits and identify how they can help your remote team maximize their success.

1) Remote Access to Assets

If your team is planning to work remotely, you need to ensure that everyone can access the files and assets they need. This can be a challenge when you use in-house servers or hard drives, as employees need to take the time to manually find, download and send individual assets to remote team members. This challenge can increase 10-fold if you’re working with large files that can’t be sent over email.

A cloud-based DAM ensures everyone has the ability to securely access, upload, download, and share the assets they need to continue working efficiently – no matter where they are. Unlike other online file-storage solutions, a DAM also offers fully customized permission settings, allowing you to limit who can access, download and share any given set of assets.

When selecting a DAM, it’s important to find a vendor that can meet the security standards required by your organization, such as compliance regulations, recovery policies, and data residency. In particular, if your organization requires data to reside within a specific geography, select a vendor that offers data centers within that area.

Providing users self-serve access enables anyone on your team to find the assets they need quickly and efficiently.

2) Easy Transfer of Projects

A DAM acts as a centralized library for all file types, including Adobe Creative Cloud files and Office documents. This capability provides remote teams with an efficient way to pass off projects from one person to another, without worrying about challenges faced when sending large files through email or delays experienced downloading design packages.

Advanced sharing features, like Web Galleries or Branded Portals, allow you to share a collection of files effortlessly, to both internal and external users. With the option to send via email or create a share link, you can also distribute these collections across multiple collaboration apps, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Wrike.

With Branded Portals, you gain the added benefit of fully customizing your portal with a highlight color, header photo, and logo. In addition, these portals can be shared via a customizable URL, providing another way to maintain your brand identity while giving end-users the ability to quickly access the files they need.

No matter which method you use to distribute your assets, you can rest assured that only individuals with specific permission settings will be able to access and download files.

3) Improved Communication

With a remote team, it’s crucial to keep communication flowing and ensure everyone is up to date on current initiatives. A DAM supports communication with numerous integrations into the marketing technologies your teams already love and use.

With project management systems integrations like Wrike and Workfront, users can easily access approved content from the DAM library, as it’s directly embedded into your project management platform. With an integration like MediaValet and Wrike in place, its easier for users to attach assets to specific projects, maintain version control, provide edits, approve content, and more.

With these various integrations, as well as many others, a DAM ensures that your content is easily accessible through all your existing platforms, encouraging collaboration and communication across your various teams.

Building Out Your Remote Tech Stack

Looking to build out your remote tech stack even more? Don’t forget to check out this post, highlights the Top Tools for Remote Teams.