Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming January 2017 26 iGaming Blue Pages I t took just a single, simple update of Amazon’s terms of service early last year to pave the way forward for online gaming companies the world over. Up until 2016, a clause in Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), listed gambling products among a specific number of “illegal activities” that were prohibited from utilizing its services to operate. That clause has now been removed. “In essence, what Amazon has said is that as long as what you are doing is legal in the jurisdiction in which you’re doing it, they’re fine with you providing gambling on their platform,” explains Sam Bashton, Head of AWS specialist Bashton Limited. That decision ultimately brings Amazon in-line with its two main rivals in iGaming in Depth the public cloud sphere – Microsoft and Google. However, the significance of what Amazon can offer its customers is already being hailed as a game changer for the gambling industry. Until recently heavily restricted by the capabilities of the hardware they had invested in, gaming companies using the Amazon cloud are – among many other benefits – now able to scale their load on demand, therefore cutting down on the restrictive cost of basic hardware. “If you look at the online retail industry as a comparison, it has been very quick to adopt public cloud technology and the reason is that there is a very clear, very strong competitive advantage to doing so,” explains Bashton, pointing to one of his company’s clients, Missguided, as an example. Amazon’s decision to open up its cloud- based Amazon Web Services to gambling operations has provided online gaming sites a unique opportunity to achieve the agility and simplicity they have craved. Cloud with a silver lining