In a recent CMS Wire article by Henrik de Gyor, he writes about what scale is, how to scale search from the beginning and long term and short term thinking on scale. Here is a portion of the article:

One thing many people do not think about enough is whether something will scale (up, out, in and/or down) as needed. Scalability is critical for any organization to consider if they plan to grow and thrive, not just survive. Otherwise, staying with decisions made in the short term will affect the organization rapidly in the long term.

What is Scale?
Ever seen a scale model car or train? It is usually smaller, less functional, less powerful and less expensive than the real thing. The same principle applies to the number of people working, the processes followed and technology in use.

Digital Asset Management is a business tool to search, find, use, reuse and repurpose digital assets quickly. That still takes people following good process empowered by technology.

Unless we archive offline at the end of an established digital asset life cycle or purge (due to regulations), we will only accumulate digital assets. The rate of growth is likely increasing and likely even multiplying regularly. We can measure and track this growth based on asset count over given periods of time. Measure what you manage. Otherwise, we better plan on increasing storage space exponentially and very often. Specific to technology, scalability is more important than ever. Nowadays, increasingly more of our assets are intangible, digital assets which require more of everything, including:

• Bandwidth
• Storage
• Hardware
• Software (that scales up)
• Concurrent users
• Processing power
• Languages (not just in the user interface, but the assets themselves if you truly have an international audience going beyond one language)
• Metadata
• Version control (of assets and metadata separately)
• Access (including mobile)
• Security vs. openness
• Rights and permissions (clearly explained)
• Collaboration
• Workflow
• User adoption
• Delivery portals to various channels/vehicles
• Reducing silos and exact duplicates
• Analytics (to measure and track usage)