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.
