Suddenly two words have become real buzz words in the industry – cloud computing and digital transformation. Earlier though the industry discussion was around these two words, but due to the sudden appearance and prolonged impact of the pandemic, talks around these technologies have got wings. Organizations have created mandates based on the government compliances that the social distancing has to be maintained and WFH or remote work must be practiced.
Today, there is hardly any industry left, which is unaware of cloud computing. Every organization wants scalability, agility, security and OPEX based infra so that their economy does not hut due to the slump in the market. Even those vertical industries including the physical gaming industry – specially the casino industry have gone online and adoption is growing like wildfire.
Although the betting and gambling industry had adopted computing as early as 90s, but the database use was not there to that extent. However, with the sporadic spike in the demand, the industry had to adopt the modernization including cloud computing and analytics for ease of operation and predictability. Computing in this gaming sector used to happen on-prem from a physical server but due to social distancing and moratorium on any sort of gathering, this industry had to go online and got aggressive on the transformation.
As per the last Grand View research report, the global online gambling market size is expected to reach US$102.97 billion by 2025, a CAGR growth of 11.5% from 2019 to 2025. This research had happened much before the pandemic. Things have changed now. It is a new normal. People do not meet physically. Therefore, the industries must devise a new strategy for business continuity. Cloud computing appears to best fit in this industry and the market prediction can be 10 times more than the earlier.
ResearchAndMarkets.com, in a press statement, said that the technologies such as Blockchain, IoT and VR are changing everything in every field including even how one can gamble in an online casino. Virtual Reality and VR Headsets have gained a lot of popularity in recent years and are revolutionary addition to the world of online gambling.
A player with VR can enter a virtual casino and play all the games without the pain of travelling. But this brings the increased apprehension of rampant cheating and frauds. Of late, there have been news that many of such organizations are not maintaining transparency and people are becoming victim of frauds. The consulting house has also an answer to this that blockchain technology can bring transparency and enhance trust among the users, which in a way can enhance reputation of the gambling sites too.
All these technologies can be brought to full use if they are hosted from cloud. As already mentioned, this industry goes through sporadic spikes, which means there is a need of elasticity in the infrastructure, which is only possible in the case of cloud. Secondly, there is always a BC support and DR in cloud as it does not allow any sort of outage – neither in power nor in the bandwidth and offers 365 degree of security coverage. So, my submission is cloud is a real panacea to all the growing industries and gaming is no exception.
