Cloudy with a chance of data: The role of multi-cloud in egaming

According to research by David Walmsley, senior leisure analyst at Mintel, the online gambling market expansion will be less driven by increases in customer numbers and more by expansion of wallet share.

This potential issue is forcing more gambling companies to look at how they can keep pace with the market. Cloud is one answer to how gaming organisations can improve their efficiency, but how can organisations use data more effectively, and what role does multi-cloud play?

From initial scepticism around security and compliance in the past, the growth of public cloud platforms has developed rapidly. For many IT teams, new software development and management methods aim to make it easier to build and run applications.

DevOps improves collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams so they can get new updates into production more efficiently. Once a game finds success with customers the cloud can scale up to meet customer demand easily. What is new here is how gambling and gaming organisations can combine their development strategies with their cloud and data approaches.

Analysing this machine data can help IT teams perform more efficiently. It can show where there are problems within a website or application that are affecting customer experience. Alongside IT, this data gathers information on customer behaviour and can also be used by other teams within the business.

Making the move

Rather than being solely reliant on any one cloud provider, multi-cloud strategies involve using multiple providers to meet specific needs. Already, our research has shown that the number of companies running multi-cloud has doubled in the past twelve months.

Companies are trying to avoid being locked into single providers as has happened within the IT sector in the past. Instead, gaming companies should look at being able to run across several cloud services as they want, or on a mix of internal IT platforms and public cloud.

The mix should support better availability of gambling services – while cloud platforms can be more resilient than individual data centres, they can still run the risk of failures and be unavailable. Running on multiple clouds can ensure that a single provider failure does not affect the business. Equally, running on multiple clouds can provide more choice over services the business can adopt.

With a multi-cloud strategy, gaming companies can evaluate which cloud services are right for them, rather than being forced to adopt everything from one provider. This can be linked up with new application deployment methods like software containerisation.

Containers can be implemented and run independently of their IT platforms, and make it easier to shift IT from one cloud service to another. The flexibility of cloud helps organisations build a cohesive platform and architecture along with the ability to analyse data from log data, application metrics, events and software tracing across these hybrid or multi-cloud environments helps gaming organisations meet their customer experience goals and their compliance and security needs.

This investment in multi-cloud and machine data together can provide more detailed insight into customer activity and actions than simply looking at user behaviour on its own. It can make it easier to manage scaling up new games and launches, and it can provide leverage in discussions around IT investments over time.

The future is therefore not just cloudy; it’s one of cloud migration linked to machine data. By using data more effectively, gaming companies can retain control over their IT destinies