multi-cloud

“The time is now” – SBC Webinars explores multi-cloud opportunities

As an increasingly online-based and tech driven sector, the betting and gaming industry is constantly seeking new and innovative solutions, as firms continue to diversify their geographic and operational scope.

One area of technological development that has caught the attention of many industries, including both betting and the sporting scene – from a business perspective – is multi-cloud services, and this was the main topic of conversation in the latest SBC Webinar.

Part of the Cloud Acceleration series, the webinar saw Paul Nearn, Solution Leader – Platform & Hybrid IT – Computacenter, observe: “Multi-cloud isn’t just something on the roadmap – it is a thing, it is a problem, and it is something that our customers are looking to address.”

Breaking down multi-cloud and how it can benefit the industry, Nearn noted that the solution is not just about the use of multiple platforms, but rather a single platform providing consistency in governance and the user experience.

In the view of the Computacenter speaker, operators can often get locked into long-commitment deals with cloud providers, which subsequently restricts workload deployment and portability.

As more and more big name operators expand their presence internationally, and either launch or acquire more brands to further diversify their portfolios, portability can be a distinct advantage.

“Multiple skill resources are needed to manage this,” Nearn said. “These cloud resources are often expensive, they often leave and can be contractors, it can be a shallow pull. We often see a lack of connectivity between those businesses that want to connect those pieces.”

Offering a perspective from another sector – albeit one that is intrinsically linked to betting and gaming, that being sports – Nick Gibbs, also of Computacenter, noted synergies between his old career in Formula One and his new clients in wagering.

He explained: “F1 really is a unique environment, but I’ve definitely found that a lot of the challenges were similar to the ones we hear about from some of the businesses I work with now at Computacenter.”

Shared challenges between F1 and betting include the need for agility, to reduce the time taken to deliver products, results and services, and ultimately deliver a high performance and reliable platform regardless of location.

“All of the sub-teams within an F1 Group demand the highest levels of performance from their supporting infrastructure,” he said.

“If they can provide more bandwidth, more Iops and less latency, then the engineers can output their work faster, they can output their work faster and they can get more components built in less time. 

“Crucially, they can spend more time analysing the results that they see, and having more thinking time means more informed decisions.”

Reliability is also a key area of concern, that being that a platform is always consistent, whether a sportsbook is operating in Britain or Brazil.

As with F1, adopting a multi-cloud product can ‘take the pressure off’ on the day of major events, resulting in a high-quality performance that ultimately benefits and retains the customer.

So how do providers supply these services? For Fred Lherhault, Field CTO EMHe EA & Emerging at Pure Storage, there are three ‘pillars’. 

These are multi-cloud storage and data management platforms, helping customers make a data centre feel like a public cloud, and offering a subscription run.

He said: “I think one of the reasons it resonates with customers and the gaming and betting industries is that because they need to operate in different locations, not all cloud providers are available in every location.”

The main benefit of this, he continued, is that it enables firms to say ‘if tomorrow we’ve got to go on-prem or we’ve got to go AWS or Azure because that’s what’s available in a specific location, we know that we’ll be able to deploy and use applications in the same map’.

Concluding his assessment, Nearn asserted with confidence that ‘the time is now’ for multi-cloud platforms, as he sees even experienced customers facing hurdles in their ‘cloud journey’.

“We had to solve some of those challenges that customers are facing,” he said. “We firmly believe that designing for multi-cloud is important, and not just for customers who are already operating in multiple clouds, but also those looking for best practice, operating in single cloud or just starting their cloud journey and avoid falling into those pitfalls that we’ve seen more enterprising customers face.”

Register and watch the full webinar HERE

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