iGaming - African Market

Accelerating iGaming in Africa: How AWS Cloud Solutions Can Unlock Market Potential

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The African iGaming market is experiencing rapid growth, with revenues reaching $1.8 billion in 2024, marking a significant 12.4% year-on-year increase from 2023. This surge in popularity presents a lucrative opportunity for operators looking to expand their presence on the continent. However, navigating Africa’s diverse regulatory landscape and meeting the demand for fast, secure, and reliable gaming experiences can be challenging.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a robust suite of cloud solutions that can help iGaming operators expedite their entry into the African market while addressing these challenges.

Leveraging AWS for iGaming in Africa

1. Enhanced Scalability with AWS Auto Scaling

AWS Auto Scaling allows iGaming platforms to dynamically adjust their capacity in response to fluctuating user demand, ensuring that players experience seamless gameplay even during peak periods. This capability is crucial in Africa, where internet penetration and mobile gaming are on the rise, leading to unpredictable traffic patterns.

2. Low Latency and High Performance

AWS’s global infrastructure, combined with its edge computing capabilities through AWS Wavelength, enables iGaming operators to deliver low-latency, high-performance experiences. This is particularly important for real-time gaming applications, where milliseconds can make a significant difference in user satisfaction.

3. Compliance and Data Residency

AWS provides solutions that meet stringent data residency and regulatory requirements, which are essential for operating in Africa’s diverse legal environments. By utilising AWS services, operators can ensure that their data remains localised, adhering to local laws while maintaining the security and reliability that AWS is known for.

4. Cost-Effective Deployment

AWS offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing iGaming operators to manage costs effectively while scaling their operations. This flexibility is vital for startups and established companies alike, as it enables them to allocate resources efficiently and respond quickly to market opportunities.

5. Enhanced Security

AWS provides robust security features, including encryption, firewalls, and access controls, which are critical for protecting sensitive player data. In an industry where trust is paramount, AWS’s security infrastructure helps build credibility and ensures compliance with regulatory standards.

As the African iGaming market continues to grow, AWS cloud solutions offer a powerful toolset for operators seeking to capitalise on this trend. By leveraging AWS’s scalability, performance, compliance capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and security features, iGaming companies can expedite their entry into Africa while delivering high-quality gaming experiences that meet the evolving needs of local players.

5 Reasons AWS cloud hosting benefits iGaming Operators

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Making the shift onto the cloud can at times be overwhelming, but undoubtedly AWS benefits outweigh the work to lift-and-shift (and completely migrate) onto the cloud. Benefits that help iGaming operators build and maintain profitable digital assets (…their core products). AWS, today offers more than two hundred services ranging from database hosting, to cloud security and machine learning. The latest statistics show that AWS has one-third of the global cloud market share, more than triple Google’s cloud and more than Microsoft Azure’s 21%.

iGaming operators are increasingly seeking reliable and scalable hosting solutions that can support the fast-paced nature of their industry. AWS cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular choice among iGaming operators due to its numerous benefits. 

AWS cloud hosting can benefit iGaming operators in five ways.  

Pay only for the resources you use 

iGaming operators will solely pay for the computer, storage and network resources consumed, when using AWS. In addition, to the shortened lead times (to deploy), costs are much lower when compared to purchased or leased IT infrastructure. AWS cloud hosting is based on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ paradigm which is much more advantageous to the purchase and maintenance of on-premise hardware.

Scalability is not an issue

Gone are the days when iGaming operators used to buy redundant equipment and infrastructure to accommodate spikes and peak loads. Most of the latter infrastructure lies idle most of the time. AWS cloud’s scalability allows these operators to scale up or down as demand fluctuates. When not paying for idle resources, significant cost savings can be experienced. This flexibility makes AWS cloud hosting an ideal choice for iGaming operators, who experience significant fluctuations in traffic.

Outsourced Infrastructure Management

AWS, together with certified partners such as 56Bit, take care of the infrastructure for clients. iGaming operators, affiliates and platform providers, can focus their IT resources on core operations, where they generate most value. Rather than constantly monitoring and managing servers and components, these resources can leverage higher level PaaS and SaaS tools. The implementation worries are shifted to the cloud provider and partners.

A related benefit is that operators can roll-out new features and functionality in very short sprints. This rapiditness in deployment is only possible by making efficient use of AWS pre-configured templates and automated deployment tools. Time-to-market is key, and AWS is an enabler to expedited deployments.

Services that enable growth 

AWS provides a wide range of enterprise grade services that would be extremely expensive for an operator to build independently. Features such as distribution on data centres in various territories around the world and redundancy, are baked into the AWS platform, irrespective of the size and structure of the client. This makes it the ideal cloud platform to fuel growth (even rapid growth!).

Critical to the iGaming sector is the high availability and reliability AWS offers. iGaming operators can have peace of mind that their casino or sportsbook platforms are available 24/7. Downtime can lead to devastating losses of both revenue and player loyalty (since they would switch to competitors when experiencing issues with their user experience). Automatic failover mechanisms are one of many methods that AWS offers which can help achieve resilience and continuity.

Top Notch Security 

AWS aids iGaming operators to improve both security and compliance – both of which are crucial to adhere to regulatory requirements and safeguard data and players’ experiences. The most common security vulnerabilities on the cloud emanate from user errors, access management oversights and misconfiguration.  

Engaging a certified partner will help in understanding and managing the shared responsibility model – the dividing line between the user and AWS’ responsibility for cloud security.

Security is a top priority for iGaming operators, as they handle sensitive player data and financial transactions. AWS cloud hosting offers numerous security features, including network security, data encryption, and access controls. The platform is compliant with industry standards such as PCI DSS, ensuring that gaming operators can meet regulatory requirements (such as those by MGA and UKGC).

Enhance your AWS infrastructure with our expertise. 

56Bit can help iGaming operators make sure the transition to AWS is smooth, seamless and frictionless. We provide a comprehensive range of cloud services to empower your organisation to make the most of AWS, while ticking all the compliance boxes. 

Get in touch with us to explore how we can help!

We are now featured on DesignRush as a top Cloud Computing Consultancy agency.

iGaming Operators – enhance business resilience through AWS

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5 Ways iGaming operators can enhance business resilience through AWS. 

iGaming operators are under huge pressure to ensure their online platforms and software systems are continuously available. Downtime costs tens of thousands of euro and leads to negative brand sentiment and reputational damage. From a back-office perspective, the number of challenges is ever growing – the increase of remote working, complexity of distributed systems and frequent releases all contribute to the risk of potential disruptions.

In this blog we will present five ways in which iGaming operators can enhance business resilience through AWS.

Move to the Cloud

Human error at data centre level accounts to around three thirds of the incidents leading to service outage. Moving to the cloud reduces this risk. AWS invested deeply in infrastructure resilience. Resilience is instilled in the design and operational model end-to-end. Upward of 84 availability zones with various data centres each, scattered around the globe, guarantee that the AWS cloud can withstand disruptions of any scale. When moving to the cloud it is crucial to understand the responsibilities of the provider and the client (i.e. share responsibility model), as they are shared.

Automate everything

Manual processes are prone to human error and therefore we can safely say they introduce risk. Automation should span from backups to testing. Automation underpins the world’s most resilient architectures worldwide. Automation will help improve operational efficiency and introduce stability. The recovery time objective will surely be shortened. Efficiency is directly linked to automation. Heavily relying on an individual’s expertise and ability is risky to business continuity. Reviewing code before deployment is paramount. Automating such processes with machine learning tools for reviewing code, will aid in automating the said process and optimise the application performance. Automated code reviews in AWS proactively identify and fix issues which are key for deployments to be a success in terms of performance, security and compliance requirements.

Test for unknowns and exceptions 

Testing is not a one-off task. It is continuous testing which helps IT teams identify and understand how systems react to unknowns in specific scenarios. Fault injection experiments and chaos engineering (i.e. breaking things purposely) are two common practices to create real-world context to uncover vulnerabilities, hidden bugs, blind spots and even performance bottlenecks (that are hard to find in distributed systems).

AWS used this methodology to increase resilience and ensure readiness under the most adverse circumstances. In addition another used testing methodology is resilience ‘game days’ which simulate failure to test the response of systems, teams and processes. iGaming operators can carry out ‘game days’ with replicas of their AWS production environments.

IT is a never-ending journey

New trends. New threats. New methodologies. New technology. It is an ever evolving space. AWS is fully embarked on striving to continuously improve its infrastructure, service design, operational model and mechanisms. Support for iGaming operators will enhance resilience. It will offer the best architectural and operational best practices services, tooling and guidance. Through rigorous partnership programmes, partners such as 56Bit will have an undisputed professional level that will help customers, such as iGaming operators, in their day-to-day operations and in their overarching strategic direction. 

Keep an eye on metrics

Understanding how your systems are performing at any giving point helps in achieving operational (and therefore resilience) excellence. Collect data and thoroughly analyse it to extract trends and in certain cases detect and resolve issues related to application performance and availability. The latter data will aid in improving UX and CX. Data is fact. Data is a single source of truth. Thus it is key to collect it to have a true picture of your applications’ health posture.

By moving the systems to the AWS cloud, the dependance on physical hardware is reduced. This is cost effective and less prone to failure. Scaling up or down is perfectly doable, cushioning traffic spikes in punters volume. Disaster recovery and security of iGaming operators’ applications are improved with services such as Amazon GuardDuty. AWS has a myriad of certifications, such as, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 – this will help igaming operators adhere to regulatory requirements when handling highly sensitive data.

Speak to us today to understand how we can help you maintain a frictionless iGaming experience for your players.