Siemens DAM goes Cloud: Modernizing a Platform at Enterprise Scale

The Limits of the Legacy Architecture

More than one million assets and 25 terabytes of content, grown over years. 7,000 active users across the globe.

The Siemens DAM project is one of the longest-running projects my team and I have been working on. The journey started back in 2018, when we lifted an AEM 6.1 DAM setup to AEM 6.3 and migrated around half a million assets with roughly 12 TB of data.

Since then, we continued developing and maintaining the DAM, added new capabilities and integrations, and over time it became a central element within the Siemens technical ecosystem. In 2019, the project was recognized with the Adobe Experience Maker Award for its technical excellence and its measurable impact on enterprise content operations.

A lot has changed since then. The amount of content kept growing, more users and systems started relying on the DAM, and the demands on the platform continued to evolve. By 2025, we were managing roughly 20 TB of content, with the DAM becoming an increasingly important part of the Siemens content supply chain.

At the same time, the technical foundation was reaching its limits. The DAM was running on a single AEM instance, which meant a single point of failure. The underlying AWS infrastructure also came with considerable operational effort and cost. From a security, resilience and scalability perspective, it was becoming increasingly clear that we needed a different foundation.

There was also a change happening on the Adobe side. Adobe had stopped further development of the legacy architecture and was focusing its further development on AEM as a Cloud Service. The cloud was increasingly becoming the place where the platform would move forward, while the legacy setup would stay where it was.

So we started looking at the different options and compared the leading DAM solutions against the requirements we had for Siemens. After the evaluation, Adobe Experience Manager Assets was clearly the best fit for the existing ecosystem and the future direction of the platform. With Groundfog being an Adobe Silver Solution Partner, we also had the right Adobe expertise on board for the transformation ahead.

But choosing the platform was only the beginning. The real challenge was transforming an enterprise-scale DAM environment without disrupting the business it supported. Over the next eight months, and after a deliberate data cleansing that brought the volume down from over one million assets to nearly 720,000 and around 20 TB of content, 7,000 active users and numerous integrations across the Siemens ecosystem had to be brought together in a single, controlled go-live.

That is where the project really started to get exciting.

Modernize the Core, Protect the Ecosystem

When we started this project, I knew we were looking at much more than a standard platform migration. Moving to a new Digital Asset Management foundation was our chance to fundamentally rethink how the core platform operates within the wider Siemens ecosystem.

Around 15 different applications rely on the DAM every day. Instead of forcing every single one of those systems into a massive, disruptive transformation, we relied on the existing API abstraction layer to act as a firm architectural boundary. I always picture this layer as a universal translator. The connected systems continue communicating through the exact same interface, even as we completely swap out the technology engine underneath. This separation gave us the freedom to modernize the DAM at its core without turning the entire corporate ecosystem into one risky IT project. That is exactly where our engineering experience at Groundfog comes into play.

Authentication presented a similar bottleneck. We needed to provide access for around 7,000 external partner users spanning roughly 170 different email domains, right alongside internal Siemens employees. The standard Adobe Identity Management Services simply could not support that level of complexity.

This was one of the areas where the partnership with Adobe really mattered. Rather than accepting a fragmented workaround, we co-innovated a Federated Guest Access model directly with Adobe, connecting it seamlessly to SiemensID. The result is a scalable, secure access model. It allowed thousands of external partners to transition to the new environment without introducing new logins or digital barriers.

For me, this is what makes our work genuinely exciting. The true engineering challenge was not just deploying AEM as a Cloud Service. The challenge was making it work flawlessly at the scale, security and complexity of a global enterprise like Siemens.

Simplifying Before Scaling

A migration is also a chance to decide what should not be migrated. Before cleansing, the platform held just over one million assets and around 25 TB of content. By deliberately filtering out what was no longer needed, the volume actually migrated came down to around 20 TB and nearly 720,000 assets.

Since 2018, when around 500,000 assets were transferred, the platform had grown. Rather than reproducing years of content sprawl, we used the project for digital cleansing. Automated analysis, validated by Siemens stakeholders, allowed us to archive hundreds of thousands of obsolete files, reducing the initial 25 terabytes down to 20 terabytes of clean, relevant data across nearly 720,000 assets. A cleaner foundation means less data to govern, maintain and search.

Using Adobe's Content Transfer Tools through the Cloud Acceleration Manager, we accelerated the transfer significantly, with delta migrations keeping the target environment synchronized with ongoing activity.

Eight Months. Minimal Disruption.

The full code and platform migration took us eight months. During this time, we went through the platform step by step and made sure that the existing functionality could be transferred to AEM as a Cloud Service.

We started with the core platform and the custom functionality around it. Custom capabilities were transferred to AEMaaCS where needed or replaced with native functionality. In parallel, we worked through the integrations with the surrounding Siemens ecosystem and rebuilt and tested them against the new environment.

The content migration ran alongside all of this. After the initial cleanup and preparation, we performed several migration passes and used delta migrations to keep the target environment synchronized with the live system. This gave us the opportunity to test the complete setup under real conditions before the final switch.

Only then came the go-live. We had a controlled content freeze of 26.5 hours, during which we performed the final content migration, switched over to the new platform and reconnected the systems depending on the DAM.

26.5 hours for nearly 720,000 assets and around 20 TB of content is a pretty tight window. Throughout the freeze, the DAM remained available in read-only mode, with support for urgent changes. Most importantly, global asset delivery continued without interruption. The content team had a controlled and temporary restriction, while the digital channels depending on the DAM simply kept running.

After eight months of preparation, the final switch was done within those 26.5 hours. And a few tests and configuration changes later, it was clear that we were good to go.

We Didn't Migrate. We Transformed.

Moving to AEM as a Cloud Service changed quite a bit more than where the DAM was running.

With the new setup, Siemens no longer has to operate the dedicated EC2 and S3 infrastructure behind the DAM. A large part of the infrastructure, maintenance and upgrade effort moves to the managed Adobe platform.

Resilience was another important reason for the move. The old single AEM instance was a clear single point of failure. With AEMaaCS, this is replaced by a multi-zone architecture with SLA-backed availability of 99.9% and above. For a platform that is used globally, that makes a real difference.

The same applies to upgrades. Instead of planning and executing major upgrade projects ourselves, Siemens gets continuous platform updates as part of the service. Security and compliance also benefit from the managed platform, including infrastructure hardening and certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

For Groundfog, a big part of the transformation was making sure that Siemens could actually take advantage of this new model without losing what had already been built. That required a good understanding of both the existing implementation and the Adobe platform, and this is where the experience we had built up over the years became particularly valuable.

Scaling the DAM Without Breaking the UI

At the end of the day, the most important question was pretty simple: can people continue doing their jobs?

We therefore focused on preserving the functionality users relied on. Since the legacy implementation had largely avoided overlays of core AEM code, we were able to use our AEM expertise to transfer the existing capabilities to AEMaaCS while keeping the familiar Touch UI.

For the roughly 16,000 named users, this meant effectively no retraining. They moved to a new platform without having to learn a completely new way of working.

But the bigger benefit of the cloud is what becomes possible afterwards.

AEMaaCS opens the door to AI-supported capabilities that can make content production and management significantly easier. Smart Tagging can automatically enrich assets with metadata, Similarity Search helps users find related assets, and AI-assisted title and description generation reduces repetitive work when creating and managing content. Together, these capabilities make it easier to manage, find and reuse content at scale.

For a DAM with nearly 720,000 assets, this is where the cloud really starts to make a difference. The platform stays familiar for the users, while the capabilities behind it become much more powerful.

The Next Stage of a Long Journey

Looking back at the project, what stands out to me is how much has changed since we started the Siemens DAM journey in 2018. We have been involved from the beginning, and over the years the DAM has grown from a large AEM implementation into a central platform for Siemens content operations.

One of our engineering principles at Groundfog is: We build like we own it. For us, that means that looking after a system is not only about keeping it running. We also take responsibility for what comes next in its lifecycle.

Having worked with the Siemens DAM for so many years, we knew both sides of the equation: the platform itself, and how the requirements around it were changing. We knew where the existing architecture was reaching its limits, but also what a future-proof, scalable DAM would need to look like. Moving to AEM as a Cloud Service was therefore the logical next step in the lifecycle of the platform.

And now the DAM has the foundation to do a lot more: scale globally, operate with greater resilience, evolve continuously and make content production and management increasingly intelligent and efficient.

For us, that is what this transformation is really about. Not simply moving an existing system to the cloud, but building the next stage of a platform we have been helping to shape for almost a decade.