Bynder Stores 175M+ Digital Assets on S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Saves 65% on Storage Costs

Headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Bynder empowers its customers (which include 20 percent of the Fortune 500) to conquer the complexity and chaos of proliferating content with a powerful, intuitive, and richly integrated DAM platform. The company, which is all-in on AWS, has been growing fast on Amazon S3 since its founding in 2013, and it has adopted new AWS services to continually innovate and improve its offering. “The exceptional thing about our close relationship with AWS is that we hear about new tools very early,” says Michiel Ranshuysen, engineering manager of DevOps at Bynder. “It’s important for us to be at the leading edge of technological advancements from AWS so that we can create new ways to grow, increase efficiency, and serve our customers better.”

Bynder has always valued the high-throughput and low-latency performance delivered by Amazon S3, which has been crucial to managing its rapidly growing digital asset portfolio. However, as its customer base expanded and data storage needs surged, the team sought avenues for greater cost efficiency without compromising performance. Bynder’s data access patterns frequently change, which makes traditional storage options less cost effective.

When AWS introduced Bynder to S3 Intelligent-Tiering in a cost optimization workshop, the team was impressed by its ability to automatically adjust storage when data access patterns change without performance impact or operational overhead. Using this solution, Bynder could optimize storage costs dynamically—an especially valuable capability for a business that experiences unpredictable client behaviors and seasonal asset demands.

After client assets are uploaded to the DAM solution, Bynder uses S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically optimize its storage on Amazon S3. “Instead of having to manually review the access pattern of assets, S3 Intelligent-Tiering does it for us automatically,” says Ranshuysen. With this Amazon S3 storage class, Bynder can adapt as needed to accommodate fluctuating data access patterns. This flexibility helps the company maintain optimal storage costs as it continues to scale.

To further reduce its expenses, Bynder adopted AWS Cost Explorer, a service to visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time. The company allocates tags to each Amazon S3 bucket so that it can carefully track costs and adjust as needed. “We do cost tagging so that we know what the Amazon S3 storage costs are for each of our product offerings,” says Ranshuysen. This practice provides Bynder with visibility into its operational expenses and empowers the company to save even more on costs. Bynder can then reinvest those resources and savings into other projects, such as artificial intelligence workloads that enhance its offerings.

Bynder is committed to maintaining its position as an innovative leader in the DAM space and has been investing in artificial intelligence and automation initiatives for many years. In particular, Bynder has adopted Amazon Rekognition, which automates image recognition and video analysis with machine learning. When a client uploads an image, Bynder can initiate a feature that sends that data to Amazon Rekognition automatically for scanning and application of relevant keyword tags. Shortly after upload, these automated tags appear under the “Automated Tags” section of the asset detail screen, helping users and systems search and find these assets more efficiently. “By automating the tagging process, we improve not only the speed but also the accuracy of asset classification, speeding up the findability of assets in our DAM,” says Ranshuysen.

A year after adopting S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Bynder faced another challenge: speeding up client onboarding as the company scales past the 1.7 million users globally. Bynder’s previous data upload process involved lengthy, labor-intensive manual efforts. To streamline the onboarding process while maintaining security and reliability, Bynder adopted AWS Transfer Family, a service that securely manages recurring business-to-business file transfers to AWS storage services. “Using AWS Transfer Family, clients can upload their assets securely to an Amazon S3 bucket within AWS, and we then import those assets into the Bynder DAM,” says Ranshuysen. “We used AWS Transfer Family to speed up this process.”

Although cost management and operational efficiency are key, Bynder is focused on serving as a single source of truth for its diverse clientele. “When clients update an asset and that image is used on a website, that change is recorded in our system. Everything is here in the cloud,” says Ranshuysen. This consolidated data approach also enhances Bynder’s disaster resilience capabilities, offering robust security measures that would be a significant challenge for traditional on-premises data centers.

Bynder is confident that it can fulfill its global mission with its systems on AWS. “In terms of efficiency, security, reliability, and durability, Amazon S3 is an essential service for us,” says Ranshuysen.