Inside Asian Gaming

January 2017 inside asian gaming 29 iGaming in Depth iGaming Blue Pages “The smaller players are now getting access to things that previously only the larger players would have had access to.” whichever country clients choose in order to ensure regulatory compliance. It also offers the added protection of multiple firewalls encompassing each and every server as opposed to just one or two levels of firewall around the entire database. “They’ve put a hell of a lot of work into ensuring that your data is encrypted and securely held. It’s very hard to make the argument that you could get better security outside of Amazon and the AWS platform,” explains Bashton. Ultimately though, the decision on whether to use AWS from which to run online gaming sites comes down to a matter of cost. “I guess essentially you get what you pay for,” says Walshaw. “If you can’t afford to run the infrastructure on Amazon then it’s going to be of no use to you because you’re not going to get a return on that infrastructure. “The beautiful thing for us is that we are a development company, we have a relatively small infrastructure and support team because that is not our core business – our core business is writing software for our customers. But the way we’ve approached it, I hope, is that our infrastructure team won’t need to grow at the same rate as our development team because it’s self-managed now. So smaller companies, if they’ve got clever developers, I would argue it makes life a damn sight easier. You’re putting control into the hands of your development team. “That’s why I say the cloud is a great leveller. Before, as a smaller company, there were a lot of things that were cost prohibitive. The ability to run active workloads across multiple data centres, the ability to do machine learning – these would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to do previously. “Now you can do that in a $5,000 monthly AWS bill quite comfortably. So the smaller players are now getting access to things that previously only the larger players would have had access to.”