CasinoBeats spoke with Computacenter and Amazon Web Services recently in the lead-up to episode 1 of their co-sponsored SBC Webinars series, ‘Cloud Acceleration’. Episode 1 takes place today, September 16th at 16:00 BST/11:00 EST and is entitled ‘Gaining Cloud Insights and Control’. You can register for episode 1 and the entire series with just one sign-up by clicking here.
CasinoBeats: What are the security challenges of expanding Cloud infrastructures/architectures for incumbents in a high-risk and high-compliance sector such as gambling? From your perspective, how has a dependence on cloud technologies changed the internal management of tech resources and businesses relationship with external suppliers?
Computacenter: The security challenges are somehow both unique and different with gaming as it is with other organisations in other sectors. Lots of the controls that you have had to deal with in your on-premises solutions still exist, but with one major difference, in cloud, your infrastructure can change.
Being able to employ the right principles is where most organisations should start. Much as the evolution of DevOps has occurred across the industry, so should the emergence of DevSecOps. Making sure that security is inherent in everything you do and is everybody’s responsibility is a key factor and organising yourself so that it happens is paramount.
Then it’s about interpretation, how do you take the controls you have today for a very static solution and employ them in a programmatic way so that they are “constant but flexible” with the solutions you deploy. We see most organisations look to leverage an external tool or technology that provides them with the overarching management capability but with the flexibility to employ the right action for the right job.
The dependence on cloud technologies has fundamentally changed the internal management of tech resources. Organisations that have done this well have fundamentally moved away from a single IT function that serves the business into a world where the business can serve itself. This doesn’t undermine the concept of things like a “centre of excellence” which is pretty much the ideal way of seeding the business with good cloud understanding and capability but it has to be built to serve in a different way.
It should become and a point of knowledge, advice and should share the practices that it has understood but should not be the bottle neck for all IT resources. This extends to the way in which external suppliers are engaged, this too must continue to evolve to a place where the business has the freedom to engage without the burden of excessive governance. This can only happen when the right guardrails are established and a common level of knowledge and understanding is achieved.
AWS: The security challenges are somehow both unique and different with gaming as it is with other organisations in other sectors. Lots of the controls that you have had to deal with in your on-premises solutions still exist, but with one major difference, in cloud, your culture and organisational structure becomes key.
Being able to scale and flex based on customer demand highlights that security is inherent in everything you do from concept, planning, code and user testing through to production. Then it’s about organisational structure, how do you take the controls you have today for a very static solution and employ them in a programmatic way so that they are “constant but flexible” with the solutions you deploy.
We see many organisations undertake reviews of their internal structures and build “pizza” teams like AWS, they have moved away from a single IT function and it serving the business into a world where the business can serve itself but with the right stakeholders in each “pizza” team.
This doesn’t undermine the concepts such as a “centre of excellence” as these become critical in seeding the business with good cloud understanding and capability but it has to be built to serve in a different way. It should become a point of knowledge, advice and should share the practices that it has understood but should not be the bottle neck for all cloud resources.
This extends to the way in which external suppliers are engaged, this too must continue to evolve to a place where the business has the freedom to engage without the burden of excessive governance. This can only happen when the right guardrails are established a common level of knowledge and understanding is achieved.
CasinoBeats: Pursuing a global growth strategy, Tier-1 operators have been burdened with higher technical costs in order to be aligned with market-by-market compliance costs – how can Cloud infrastructures reduce these increased demands?
Computacenter: The cloud providers are responding to this with key solutions that are specifically designed to allow gaming organisations the flexibility to align with market compliance but with the consistency of a common set of operating capabilities and procedures.
As we have discussed before, if you are to maintain a level of compliance and control, things must be (in some way) common. You need to be able to educate the organisation and provide the structure and principles such that it is easy for anybody within the business to experiment and create new services.
They can only do this safely if the complexity of the underlying infrastructure is removed, this is none more apparent when it comes to delivery specific market solutions, many of which require physical presence and specific guidelines.
Solutions such as AWS Outpost, provide that commonality but also provide the flexibility to accommodate local market compliance solutions. Which ultimately means that your business can interact, manage, experiment and deploy solutions in a common fashion with regulation or compliance “delivered in code.”
CasinoBeats: Beyond its technology remit, how do you expose/expand the benefits of effective cloud infrastructure to wider team organisations (marketing, operations, customer care, management)… How do you avoid ‘Cloud Silos’ or the Cloud simply becoming the domain of the tech team?
Computacenter: The idea of an organisation transforming to leverage cloud is a well-documented principle but at its heart is almost always the sense of community and the commonality that everybody wants to achieve the same outcome. That being, the business is more able to respond to its own need without a common cloud team being in the middle of everything that gets done.
We have discussed this before but a well-established ‘cloud centre of excellence,’ or CoE, is the solution Computacenter has helped many other customers adopt. This isn’t just about a new organisation chart or a process, more the cultural shift that goes first. A well-established CoE should absolutely start with representation from across the business.
This initial team with the support of the business and potentially third parties that can help, work first to create a demonstration of what’s possible. How you share what they have achieved and how you help others connect and want to engage is critical.
Once established there are multiple ways of scaling this capability, but in essence, the CoE should always be the advisor and the supporter and never the deliverer. Then as more of the business starts to understand what’s possible, they can then be educated on how to make this possible and ultimately, deliver what they need on their own.
Register for today’s first episode by clicking here and entering your details, and you’ll also be registered for October’s Episode 2 which will focus on how innovative technology can make new market expansion simple, with November’s Episode 3 showing how extracting value from your data is key to personalising and safeguarding the player experience.
