Hosting your precious content costs money. It seems like more and more people are falling for that. In this blog, Sebastiaan de Ruiter talks about the importance of truly secure hosting and what's involved.

Dizzying sums

In my previous blog, I wrote that you can recoup an investment in marketing automation in general, or in digital asset management in particular, within a year, if only by the number of hours you spend less time searching. Organizations are usually pretty quick to convince themselves of that. What I've noticed a lot lately is that people then do fall over the cost of hosting quite a bit. That rather baffles me. As content-driven organizations, we all spend staggering amounts of money to create the most beautiful content. It seems only logical to me that we then want to protect it against unauthorized or illegal access.

Little transparency in cloud licensing models

I understand somewhere where it comes from. Prices of licensing models used by Marketing Automation parties are not always transparent. Some vendors lure organizations with low prices, but then when an additional user is added, a hefty wallet must be drawn. Or they look at consumer solutions. At Apple, for example, you can get two terabytes of iCloud storage for less than ten bucks a month. Wonderful, but at the end of the day, of course, it's just a vulgar (mass is checkout) lock-in model to keep you with this provider, because just switch to another party.

Good security requires a hefty investment

In the old days, when the cloud was unknown - and unloved - we used to pay thousands of dollars to set up and maintain servers in refrigerated rooms at our business location. Now we think a few euros for a gigabyte of storage is already a lot. Whereas securing data centers with access protocols, biometric scanning profiles and 24/7 surveillance and monitoring and physical security by specially trained security guards, with CCTV cameras and biometric access controls requires a hefty investment. Not to mention securing the application and connections themselves through encryption, firewalls and virus scanners including the ISO standards demanded today. Behind the scenes, there is a lot involved in meeting all the security standards and laws and regulations, including backups. If you store one terabyte of content, you also need at least one terabyte for backup.

Are you getting what you need?

Sure, you can share your content through a tool like Dropbox, OneDrive or WeTransfer. But seriously ask yourself if you're getting what you need then. Are you looking for something more than a repository where you can dump your content, do you want structure and quality, find what you're looking for, share files with proper access rights and do you value security, oversight and good management? Then that comes at a price. But trust me, you'll more than recoup that.

Curious?

Comrads is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified and complies with the requirements and standards of the AVG. To this end, Comrads takes strict precautionary, technical and organizational security measures to ensure a high level of security to protect your data, data and files from unauthorized or unlawful access. Would you like to know more about our security measures or are you curious about the benefits of Digital Asset Management? Then request a no-obligation demo right away. We like to think along with you. Now and in the future.