Hi,
this is a tough question ... because the term "both departments develop and manage their own applications" can mean a lot of different things. If they only have different components and templates, it's easily doable to have it running in the same container. When they develop their own OSGI bundles, it's getting more complex. But if the complete handling of the plattform, the SLAs and other operational aspects, or if they can simply not agree on a common plattform, you have to split up and create a own setup for each of the departments.
But: is there an agreement on the DAM assets? Same structure, same nodes, same metadata, same assets? If that's the case, the easiest would be to define one platform as the leading one and do all the changes there, and replicate them over to the other one. Or you setup a dedicated DAM system, where the assets are stored, and which has its own "publish" system; all the authoring environments just use references to this environment as placeholders.
There are a lot of options here. But also from a complexity point of view I would really try to have both applications on the same system. Otherwise you need to go distributed, which makes the whole thing much more complex (and probably more expensive as well). But that will likely require more information and a deeper discussion to give you a better advice.
kind regards,
Jörg
