Role-based authorization systems
Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems provide an effective way to store, manage and distribute digital content. This allows images, videos, and documents to be located quickly and easily. They also enable sharing and collaboration between internal and external stakeholders. Providing a purpose-driven toolkit for each role enables processes to be streamlined and the value of content to be enhanced, while ensuring compliance with necessary restrictions.
The assignment of access rights is of central importance in this context. Primarily, it's about controlling who can take what actions with what digital assets – view, enrich, manage, or acquire. This is particularly important because today's organizations have a large number of digital assets that are used by different stakeholders.
If you want to simplify the process of granting access rights to digital assets, it is advisable to make an assessment of all internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, it helps to record the needs as well as the respective tasks and competencies. In this way, a sensible structure of the various roles can be developed within a reasonable period of time, which can be easily maintained.
Role-based access to digital assets is a key driver of productivity. By defining clear roles and associated permissions, content can be created, managed, and securely accessed faster and more efficiently. At the same time, content workflow processes become leaner and clearer.
At the heart of effective authorization is the approach of providing people with only those resources and functions that they actually need to perform their tasks.
Employees as well as external contractors are therefore grouped into user groups based on their tasks and associated competencies. Additionally assigned roles determine which rights are given to edit the assets. Employees can belong to the Marketing user group and, among other things, are assigned the role of «Asset Manager» in the Marketing group, who can read, edit and delete the assets. With the role of «Content Creator» in the Marketing group, for example, one would only be authorized to upload and read the assets. Sophisticated access authorization thus simplifies maintenance and saves a lot of time and effort.
Users are assigned to user groups according to their tasks. For example, if you work in the Marketing team, you automatically have a set of defined access rights that are different from those of human resources. In addition, the management of access rights remains clear and uncomplicated should a person newly join the company, change departments or leave the company.
The following points should be considered when implementing role-based access to digital assets:
- First, create an overview of the tasks to be performed.
- Group your users into clear and meaningful user groups. This will help you determine who can access what content.
- Define appropriate roles for the tasks to be performed to determine the authorization level – read, edit, delete – in the context of the corresponding user group.
A DAM system that is integrated into the existing system landscape and has well thought-out role and rights management ensures greater productivity and efficiency, thus contributing to further savings.