As the data centre and managed services provider of choice to the online gaming industry Continent 8 Technologies is proud of a long history of successful engagement and compliance with regulating bodies around the world.

As the sector has grown globally the company has always been entirely supportive of individual regulators in their efforts towards enforcing the conditions imposed on their respective licensees. These conditions are important to ensure fair, legal and regulated gameplay ensuring that the interests of players are protected, at all times. In this regard Continent 8 serves as a fiduciary for the regulators whilst providing superior technical solutions to the licensees themselves.

As such, Continent 8 heartily welcomes this week’s announcements by both the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) of the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake and the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) outlining a series of new steps relating to KGC licensed operators who may have previously provided services to residents of the United States from the Mohawk-owned data centre in Kahnawake.

Given this new agreement, Continent 8 has worked in collaboration with the KGC and DGE around a number of specific requests related to individual licensees operating in the Kahnawake jurisdiction who have been found in violation of this agreement.  A number of steps have already been taken including, where appropriate, termination of related services.

As the only licensed Data Centre provider in New Jersey, Continent 8 remains fully committed to the further regulation, and growth of the industry within the United States and beyond. We will therefore continue to grow our close working relationship with all global regulators and take any further necessary steps to support the further growth, regulation and success of the industry.

A key differentiator for Continent 8 is its global data centre footprint connected by a unique private network, says global sales director Peter Williams

The data centre world revolves around the ever-growing need to minimize all conceivable risks.

Many millions have been spent by online gaming providers in recent years, all in the pursuit of the highest levels of availability, security and redundancy. Without all three of those attributes you couldn’t be considered to be “in the game” or taken seriously by the service providers, operators and their customers.

Thus, as demand grows, so does the need for greater capacity, redundancy and services.

While an individual data centre can have the highest levels of redundancy and resilience available, there is a theory that there are still some inherent risks due to it being a single site. While not a true “all eggs in one basket” scenario – as these are very resilient, very well protected and highly available eggs – it is after all one basket.

Moreover, to mitigate this potential (albeit slight) additional risk, the ultimate solution would be to have two completely separate sites between which you can distribute your infrastructure for ultimate disaster-recovery capability.

Continent 8 is therefore delighted that as a result of continued growth in Malta, we have opened our second data centre site on the island. This move not only serves the “ultimate” in resilience to the island, but also enables new options for existing clients in terms of distributed services and will certainly appeal to new entrants to the jurisdiction.

But it’s not just Malta that’s had our attention of late; the company has been working on a number of other key initiatives, with some exciting new services in the pipeline.

NEW LOCATIONS

In addition to the new data centre in Malta, we have also launched two new data centre locations in the last 12 months.

In December, we went live with our data centre in Lisbon, Portugal, to serve the emerging market in the country, and in February our new Asian-facing facility went live in Taiwan. Both facilities have been deployed in direct response to our customers’ requirements – a philosophy that has underpinned the company’s growth strategy since its inception.

CLOUD BACK-UP EXPANSION

Just over two years ago, Continent 8 launched its revolutionary cloud back-up product. The first node was installed in our Isle of Man data centre, which facilitated back-ups locally and from around the world.

The growth has been unprecedented and today the platform is protecting more than 18 trillion bytes of global critical data, which in layman’s terms, is the sum volume of more than 13 million floppy discs.

Based on this success of the Isle of Man platform, Continent 8 has since taken cloud backup global, with new nodes in Malta and Dublin with plans for a further node on Gibraltar this autumn.

LAUNCH OF CLOUD CONNECT

In April, we went live with our new Cloud Connect product. The service brings commodity cloud providers – such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure – together with their end customers, wherever on the Continent 8 network they are.

In doing so, this alleviates some of the primary concerns around public cloud adoption such as security and availability.  By bypassing the public internet, enterprises can now improve performance, reduce costs, increase security and leverage public cloud services for more of their applications.

Any customer, hosted in any location can be provided with a virtual circuit directly to their cloud provider of choice.

DDOS PROTECTION AND MITIGATION

Our offering that protects against the effects of distributed denial-of-service attacks continues to expand and over the past year we have invested significantly in our global network capacity. During the latter half of 2016 we will go live with new mitigation centres on the US west coast and in Asia, adding to our London and New York locations.

In order to support the increased DDoS services, we will be expanding our private global network from the north-east US through to Los Angeles and on to south-east Asia – our network will then circumnavigate the globe.

ISO 27001

Continent 8 continues to have our approach towards service excellence externally verified and we are pleased to announce that in December we were fully accredited with ISO 27001 for the provision of managed hosting services in our Isle of Man, Dublin and Gibraltar data centres, with Malta being accredited in July.

MANAGED SERVICES ENHANCEMENTS

Continent 8 continues to expand our technical teams, which operate across all of our data centre sites and are driven by two global network operations centres – our EMEA NOC, located in Dublin, Ireland, and our North American NOC, operating out of Montreal, Canada.

This continued expansion and the ever-increasing skill levels across the teams are proving to be enablers for the company, presenting more opportunities to move higher up the “value chain” with our customers. Based on this, investment development is currently underway for a new range of more integrated, end-to-end managed solutions.

As is plain to see, the last 12 months have been exciting to say the least, and with our second data centre a significant milestone is about to be achieved for Continent 8 in Malta.

It is a mutually beneficial environment where ideas are exchanged and innovation occurs. We’re very much looking forward to working with our customers to drive innovation and technological developments.

Article appeared in the iNTERGAMINGi issue 5, 2016

 A jurisdictional update Nick Nally of Continent 8 provides an essential look at the latest developments in the industry.

One year on and another jurisdictional report… it’s quite natural to look introspectively at the thoughts and predictions of last year to measure their accuracy or indeed if any came to fruition.

Continuing M&A activity

One of the main themes across the industry last year was that of merger and acquisition activity – this year is no different. At the beginning of the year, Paddy Power and Betfair completed their €9 billion merger creating a giant in the online gaming market; while any day now, we expect to see Ladbrokes and Gala Coral consummate their deal. This time last year, 888 and GVC Holdings were vying for the hand of bwin.party with the latter coming out on top earlier this year to tie up the deal. 888 was again unsuccessful recently when it teamed up with Rank Group to acquire William Hill but their advances were spurned. I think we would all agree that this is not the end of the M&A activity with some actively looking for opportunities, be it to enter into new geographical markets, player acquisition, acquire new technological advancements or to shorten the development cycle of building in-house.

The UK and Brexit

The UK was in the headlines last year as a result of the considerations of the Point of Consumption Tax which was introduced at the end of 2014. That seems to pale into insignificance now given the result of the UK European Union membership referendum which took place in June of this year. The referendum, more commonly known as the Brexit referendum, shocked many observers when it resulted in a majority decision to leave the EU. For the gambling industry it has particular significance. Three months on and there are still very few who understand all the implications for the sector. While it has been argued that there will be limited overall impact, there are significant challenges for some jurisdictions, Gibraltar being one of those. The potential issues for Gibraltar operators stretch beyond ensuring that they are compliant when addressing their EU business, they have the very real issues surrounding the border with Spain, leading to difficulties with movement of labour and goods. This has led many, if not all, to consider worst-case scenarios and to plan and build structures to minimise disruption wherever possible. The one good aspect to all of this is that the delay by the government in invoking Article 50 is giving everyone some time. The gut instinct tells me that there may be a few twists and turns before this is all settled and the entrepreneurial spirit within Gibraltar will have some impact in the end.

“Grey becomes black and white”

The title of this paragraph gives a clue to my musical leanings as a teenager but it came to mind as I thought about an interesting and more prevalent development in the sector over the past couple of years; that of the involvement of regulators when it comes to the suitability of licensees as determined by their interest in markets outside of their particular control. It wasn’t that long ago when it was simple, the world was one homogenous market, one colour… you could serve everything with one infrastructure sitting in a reliable data centre with disaster recovery in another, if you were very advanced. With the incessant and unstoppable move towards regulation worldwide, jurisdictions are declaring their colours as to whether they are black or white but regulators are increasingly looking at the level to which their licensees have previously or may currently be conducting business in black markets. Companies in the UK applying for a licence have had to declare their business interest in all markets over a certain level; the Division of Gaming Enforcement in New Jersey has gone as far as trying to decipher between grey and black markets; California has hinted at levels of suitability based upon historical activity in the US market and most recently, PAGCOR in the Philippines, in its move to introduce licensing for foreign-based operators has referred to black markets in Asia. Ultimately, this points to highly regulated markets with little room for offenders.

US Market – another year on

Another year on and very little movement in the quest to regulate the US, however, the fact that an event hasn’t happened only makes it more likely that it will in the future! This time last year we were talking about the possibility of another state emerging. The latest betting is on Pennsylvania to open up next but it is improbable that anything will happen before the highly anticipated elections in November. Other states listed as having the potential to open up include Michigan, New York and California, however predicting timeframes would be futile at this juncture. There is no doubt that the number of interested parties are extensive and will contribute to the lengthy process. When one considers other open and regulated markets where all gaming is regulated including poker, casino and sports betting, it takes some foresight to ever see this happening in US States given the myriad stakeholders.

However, a lot of work to date has been done in a few states. In New Jersey in particular, other states would do well to consider the extensive work they have put in and the experience gained. As a final note on the US, I will refer back to a point made last year… it is very important that regulating states are pragmatic when it comes to the siting of servers and other factors such as taxation. As a case in point, ARJEL in France has just announced that its licensed online betting operators have incurred a collective loss of €5 million last year! This is in a country of 66 million people and where sports betting increased last year by 30% to a record €1.4bn. Having to place infrastructure in individual states adds unnecessary costs on operators while also limiting competition and preventing economies of scale.

Virtual, fantasy and reality

In the absence of substantial real-money gaming and betting market options in some markets, there has been a significant rise in the development of a number of gaming/gambling offerings such as social gaming, fantasy sports, esports, virtual and augmented reality. While traditional gambling products have taxed the minds of regulators across the globe for many years, these new offerings are likely to cause much consternation among this group going forward. Offerings and products in this space are so rich and complex that the demarcation lines between gaming and gambling are not so clear any more. We have the question of digital and other forms of currencies and whether their use constitutes gambling, a trend that is likely to continue and will likely need to be regulated. The rise of esports has been quite phenomenal, and I do have to admit that it is difficult for me to get my head around this one… not being a millennial probably doesn’t help! But the growth in the sector has given rise to large increases in gambling, thus putting the sector in the crosshairs. After a very rocky period in the world of fantasy sports, there seems to be some semblance of normality coming back to the sector. At this point in time, seven US states have passed daily fantasy sports bills with many more proposing some form of regulation. Finally, the advent of Pokémon GO has catapulted the topic of augmented reality into the spotlight. The sector is still in its infancy, the technology is developing but the customer experience possibilities are exciting, suffice it to say that it will be another area that will require consideration in terms of regulation.

And so to wrap up with some summary predictions for the coming year. Jurisdictionally, there will undoubtedly be further developments within Africa and South America – both are generating a good level of focus this year. The markets throughout Asia are ever-developing, and while I’m sure there will be more twists and turns to come we are already reaching a new level of clarity on the opportunities.

From a technology point of view, further advancements in cyber-security defences will be required to combat ‘deeper’ attack capabilities and larger global data leaks are inevitable. There will be faster loading and more immersive games, faster mobiles released to play them on with more AR and VR development aplenty…. Oh, and not forgetting, a new president of the United States.

Article appeared in the eGR Jurisdictions Report, 2016

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