Varian

The Client

Varian is a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

The Situation

With a broad portfolio of imaging and cancer care technologies and services offered as a single, unified company, Varian needed to effectively manage a plethora of marketing collateral, photos, videos, PowerPoint presentations, and more. 

The Challenge

Varian shares marketing and sales materials with teams and vendors across the globe — including in the Americas, APAC, and EMEA — meaning that the company needed a digital asset management platform capable of organizing assets and monitoring downloads. 

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The Solution

Varian implemented Acquia DAM as a centralized location for everything digital. “[It] is a single source of truth for all of our brand assets, so people don’t need to search for them in multiple locations and repositories. We drive them to the DAM system to get assets they use every day like brochures, specs, case studies, and photography,” said Sandra De Biasi, Varian’s project manager of digital assets and graphics.

After a company rebranding, Varian started tracking content usage. “We wanted to see if people were adopting the DAM system, so I was monitoring if assets were being downloaded from the DAM system and where.” Varian’s DAM system included new brand files from their rebrand initiative, case studies, and technical specs — a lot of sensitive information they don’t want readily available to the world.

Content analytics revealed download anomaly

Using Acquia DAM’s Insights add-on to track per-user downloads, De Biasi noticed an anomaly and quickly realized something wasn’t right. “I monitored on a 30-day basis to see how many assets were downloaded and by whom. After one weekend, I came into work Monday morning and noticed a gigantic spike in the download data. One person was downloading over 1,900 assets. That immediately threw up a red flag. We only had 2,200 assets in our DAM system at the time, and no one ever needs that many assets for one project.”

Insights provided De Biasi with the necessary information to swiftly take the appropriate action. She was able to identify who the user was, expire their access, and investigate what was going on. “Insights provides timestamps, so I could see when the user started downloading assets and how many. In a 4-hour period, Sunday and Monday morning, they had downloaded over 1,900 assets. That seemed like a deliberate download breach. I could also see that it was a vendor and that the assets were being downloaded in China. The fact that they were working on our off-hours was also cause for concern,” she said.

She continued, “I was able to further identify that the user was an outside vendor and typically only downloaded what they needed for specific projects. I knew that 1,900 assets were not for a specific project.”

The Results

Acquia DAM’s analytics reports alerted Varian to a potential problem, allowing the company to take quick, decisive action.

Saved hundreds of thousands in lost revenue

“It saved us a huge loss in revenue. I mean, we pay dearly for these assets. Vendors working with us have access to our source files, so basically, that’s the blueprint to take our information and go create their own branded assets with everything that we paid for. We determined it was somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of property that they tried to take,” De Biasi explained.

Asset permissions

Varian has also used Insights reporting to ensure only appropriate users have access to specific resources. “We just rebranded the company, and we had to buy licenses for our new font package — we have limited licenses and only want them for the people creating new assets for us or their group. We need to monitor that usage, so I’ve permissioned the font package in such a way that I can see all of the people who’ve been given use of the font,” she said.

The value of content analytics

De Biasi appreciates that Acquia DAM has helped her team more effectively protect the digital assets they worked so hard to create. “Content analytics are so valuable! You may not think that you need them now, but it’s a good practice. This is your intellectual property, so you want to safeguard and monitor who’s using it. You just never know when something will happen,” she concluded.