The Continent 8 Technologies team looks forward to attending G2E Asia @ the Philippines 2019 in Manila on 3-4 December. G2E Asia @ the Philippines will explore the opportunities and challenges presented by ASEAN gaming markets, including cybersecurity, financial technology and investment, gaming, and integrated resorts. Our team looks forward to discussing the future of gaming in ASEAN markets.
Serving the iGaming industry, Continent 8 provides globally managed hosting, networking, security, and Cloud infrastructure services in over 50 connected locations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For over 20 years, Continent 8 has served customers in highly regulated and technically challenging locations around the world.
If you’re interested in support for your online operations in Asia, Continent 8’s low latency network throughout Asia offers a consistent and reliable platform for serving your clients. In addition to co-location facilities, our network points of presence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore connect to the rest of the world over a high-capacity, fully-redundant private network. Continent 8 also offers highly reliable DDoS monitoring and mitigation services throughout Asia and around the world.
Heading to G2E Asia @ the Philippines 2019? Set up a meeting with Continent 8 delegates Peter Williams, Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, and Craig Lusher, Senior Solutions Architect.
G2E Asia @ the Philippines
December 2019
Marriott Manila,
Philippines
Email: sales@continent8.com
Phone: +44 1624 694625
The Continent 8 Technologies team is thrilled to be heading to London for the SBC Awards at Battersea Evolution on 3 December. The SBC Awards are dedicated to recognizing “the achievements of operators and affiliates, as well as suppliers from across all the major disciplines including payments, marketing, platform providers and data.” We look forward to connecting with the most innovative leaders in the gaming and sports betting industry on this momentous occasion.
Continent 8 is an award-winning, multi-jurisdictional global Cloud infrastructure solutions provider for online gaming, sports betting, and eSports. Our advanced data centres and high quality networks support critical online operations in both private and public-sector organisations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Each connected location provides gaming operators with vital reliability, connectivity, security, and compliance as they expand across regulated markets.
Headed to London for the SBC Awards? Set up a meeting with the Continent 8 team!
Event DetailsSBC Awards
3 December 2019
Battersea Evolution
London, UK
Email: sales@continent8.com
Phone: +44 1624 694625
On November 8, GI Friday featured a guest column by Justin Cosnett, Head of Solution Architecture at Continent 8 Technologies. Read Justin’s column detailing Continent 8’s work in Malta, as well as the region’s gaming developments.
What’s Next for Gaming in Malta – Continent 8 Technologies has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with Malta since 2003, even prior to the formation of the then Lotteries and Gaming Authority. At that time, Malta successfully positioned itself as a ‘gateway to Europe,’ being the first EU member to license and regulate online gaming. Malta also had significant international ambitions and its government and the private sector stakeholders successfully created a value proposition for the online gaming market. According to the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry, the gaming sector in Malta has grown to represent some 12% of the island’s GDP, making Malta a global gaming hub. Subsequently, we have seen dramatic regulatory, market and technological change, which has had an effect on our Maltese-focused operations and customers.
Regulatory change: As technology continues to develop, regulations in both the EU and Malta have changed, with concomitant effects on infrastructure, operations and management. Some regulating EU states have imposed or created “data safe” or local data replicas, and while infrastructure could remain in Malta, this poses an additional burden. Some regulatory change which isn’t technological or operational has influenced market change.
Market change: New entrants are rarer, certainly on the EU-wide B2C operator basis, and significant M & A activity has resulted in more enterprise or fewer large companies. Some of this has been driven by the need to scale to meet regulatory pressures and maintain margins, some due to aggressive growth strategies. In many cases, this results in a technological change or refresh, in some instances leading to the closure of operations or infrastructure locations in favour of growing an existing alternate location. This hasn’t always been directly beneficial to Malta, but sometimes it can result in use of existing infrastructure and operations in Malta.
Technological change: New entrants to the market tend to be smaller and more content or B2C-focused. Their desire to come to Malta is good news for the island. Many of these start-ups utilise cloud to minimise the investment and provide scale.
From a technological perspective, change is often led by growth or renewal projects, where new risks or challenges inform the overall design. Having a growing global offering grants choice and flexibility to meet these challenges and create new infrastructure designs to support the industry in Malta. This year alone there has been significant change, including enabling companies to create infrastructure deployments in global high peering locations, acting as a global “engine;” and extending this to Malta with dedicated infrastructure or public cloud to provide regulatory data. Particularly useful to sportsbook operators, provisioning secure connectivity to hyper-scale cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, has enabled “burst” infrastructure access or global front-end service delivery.
Times are changing for the industry but in the past 16 years, Malta and Continent 8 have developed solutions to the challenges that arise. As we look ahead to the promising opportunities for the gaming sector, our commitment to Malta is just as strong now as it was in 2003.
View Justin’s guest column on pages 9 and 10 of GI Friday Week 45.
The Continent 8 team will be in Buenos Aires, Argentina for SAGSE 2019, November 20-22. SAGSE is a Latin American gaming event, promoting the exchange of ideas on topics such as regulation, intellectual property, payment solutions, artificial intelligence, and affiliate marketing.
Members of the Continent 8 team look forward to engaging in discussions with other industry leaders about the future of gaming in Latin America. With new locations opening up by 2020, the Continent 8 network will expand across South America and provide end users with the best-in-class connectivity experience. Connect with us at SAGSE to learn how Continent 8 can support your Latin American gaming operations. CEO Michael Tobin will be attending, along with Chief Development Officer Nick Nally and Account Director Mario Dealba.
Mario Dealba states:
“With hundreds of gaming sites, suppliers and payment processors in our global private network, Continent 8 Technologies is the leading gaming data center network in the world. Schedule a meeting to learn about online gaming infrastructure, cyber security challenges in the industry as well as how we can best serve your specific needs.”
SAGSE
November 20-22, 2019
Costa Salguero Convention Center – Buenos Aires, Argentina
Email: sales@continent8.com
Tel. +1 514 461 5120
On October 21, Justin Cosnett, Head of Solution Architecture for Continent 8 Technologies, was interviewed by iNTERGAMINGi editor Matt Chambers about the security, connectivity, and compliance issues affecting gaming operators across emerging markets.
JC: We connect, manage and secure igaming critical infrastructure for operators and software providers to meet regulatory, availability and ‘global’ reach requirements. Example solutions would be: global internet access, cloud, hosting, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) mitigation. Continent 8 is particularly well-known in the igaming market, but our core services have changed and adapted and matured along with our customers and their operating environments over our 20-plus year lifetime. In addition, we have expanded into other markets such as government, fintech and most recently esports.
I’d have to state first that evolution is significantly different in different jurisdictions or regions for igaming. In Europe for example, regulatory changes have meant we have implemented approved cloud-enabled solutions to the market. More stringent requirements have been loosened, where appropriate or suitable, and some have been able to take advantage of this for technical efficiency. Others prefer to remain consolidated in a single on-premise hub location. This leads to interaction with our customers around solution design based not only on today’s activities, but on where this evolution might go tomorrow.
In others, for example in the United States, we have grown our hosting footprint and state by state connectivity, as well as created our Atlantic City hub, to meet the differing regulatory environment of our customers. It’s been a significant and rapid acceleration in our locations and network, led by an emerging regulatory landscape, a challenge which continues as each further state launches.
Latin America is an area where we are looking to expand further. This is again due to significant activity in the region from a regulatory perspective. Continent 8 will always be a partner which tries to meet these expansionary challenges for our existing or potentially new igaming customers.
In general, growth of newly regulated markets across the world brings complexity and sometimes specific data storage, transfer and protection requirements. Maturity of existing markets tends to lead to a strengthening of requirements. The main challenge for any operator is ‘keeping up’ from a compliance perspective, whilst also allowing teams to utilise data which can be a valuable analytical or actionable toolset.
Operators at the leading edge of data mining and analytics techniques; trying to create a superior or more efficient customer experience, are having to store, export and manipulate significant datasets between hosted, cloud and hybrid infrastructures in different countries or even continents. Simultaneously ensuring the right data is kept in the right place with the right level of encryption or anonymisation, destroying data not needed, and maintaining data which is needed for the right period of time.
Reliability and connectivity in the European regulatory jurisdictions have improved significantly from where it was a few years ago. This is in part as a result of significant investment by certain suppliers to meet the market demand, so I understand the focus on emerging markets, where this may not as yet have taken place. However, it’s worth noting that this stability can lead to development and innovation in an operator’s product which then isn’t capable in less reliable and connected markets.
Also, many operators are expanding into emerging markets from a European base or as part of a partnership between a local provider and a European one, thus having an influence even in emerging market expanded activity.
In developing or emerging markets such as Latin America and Africa, challenges faced in the past, such as latency between customer and technology, or connection reliability, is going to test operators which are more sensitive in their application design and delivery. Those operators which have faced and dealt with such challenges before, need to ensure they still meet them, whereas new entrants may need to swiftly adapt or innovate.
In the United States, the legislative interpretations of the Wire Act; has meant that some operators are targeting application access ‘in-state’ to similar ‘in-state’ infrastructure – a different challenge to the European model, where ‘out of jurisdiction’ access to different countries at the greatest speed and reliability was sought, so an almost opposite model. Therefore, whilst connectivity and service reliability are well developed, it’s a different operating environment to consider when designing infrastructure deployments.
Good compliance and security of data tend to go hand in hand, and whilst you may have a difference in regional compliance requirements, the best operators will have a holistic best practice approach within the legislative parameters. Changes in data protection regulations, particularly in Europe, clearly incentivise a business to ensure no data loss or breach. Whilst ultimately operators will ensure the security of their data from an encryption and access perspective, Continent 8 can assist in areas such as DDoS mitigation – as DDoS attacks can often be undertaken as cover for a data exfiltration attempts whilst network and security teams are distracted.
At Continent 8, our security experience has been predominantly in DDoS mitigation – understandable given our customers exist in a highly targeted environment. We are therefore seeking to expand that offering to provide greater application level protection for our customers with web application firewalling (WAF) and Layer 7 network protection methods. We have seen a growth in this requirement in Asia in particular, where we may be able to bring a market focused capability.
In terms of advice and strategies, we have always recommended a reduced surface area approach to our customers. That is, using private connectivity which isn’t via public IP address space, and therefore unable to be attacked (as it isn’t exposed to the internet). We have seen and expect a growth in such deployments to offer a reduced attack surface, as well as enabling customers to monitor, manage and maintain service availability. We have ambitions to create an igaming cloud of privately connected 828 providers globally and expect to be releasing and launching products and services in the next year to enable this, potentially bringing content providers, payment providers, operators, and potentially data providers within a private network.
We have seen an increase in size, complexity and vector of DDoS attacks more generally, which will require a more customer-led or ‘tuned’ protection regime. We will have to keep up to the challenges with additional resource expertise, availability and engagement; along with the entire security industry.
No defence is or will be perfect and a focus needs to be on how companies react and deal with an issue. There is less viability in ‘off the shelf’ protections being suitable, and operators will need to ensure they have their own preparedness or ability to react and work with security vendors to maintain protection or service availability.”
Read the article as it originally appeared on page 39 of iNTERGAMINGi 2019 Issue 4.
Justin Cosnett, Head of Solution Architecture at Continent 8 Technologies, speaks with Owain Flanders of Gaming America Magazine about the rapidly-growing United States market in the G2E 2019 Preview Issue, published September 29, 2019.
We have 20 years of experience with clients helping them set up in locations they have limited experience with or existing contacts in. We’ve generally done a lot of exploring in locations to find suitable data centers for other clients. We always make sure we deliver a resilient, private network connection to every single location, so that allows us to run a resilient global network around the globe on top of lots of individual private connections.
New Jersey has historically been focused on a licensing and registering regime based on casino facilities. Casinos may have quite a good standard of data hosting halls, but they’re not independent custom-built data centers. Initial regulation meant those who wanted to provide online gaming had to partner with a casino and have their server infrastructure within that casino premise. The main result of the partnership was independence. It is a data center without a brand, so you could host with us, and service all casinos.
The convention center facilities, combined with the network and data center, can potentially support events benefitting from such an environment, like esports events.
It led to a rapid escalation in activity. We already had partnerships with a couple of casinos in in Atlantic City, because New Jersey was at the forefront of preparing for legalization. A lot of other states started to regulate very rapidly and many of our existing customer base and new customers came to us needing support for their operating infrastructure.
A build takes a significant amount of time. Even taking residence in existing facilities tends to take two to three months, or maybe even more, especially bringing in private connectivity to a location. We sometimes had to do these things in less than four weeks, because every one of our customers is looking to go to market first after the regulation is approved. That’s where the pressure is.
It was more trying to determine how many customers would be going to a state and when. We look at where the market is going ad think if there is going to be significant operator activity in a state, it’s probably an area we should prioritize and start setting up. If there is a big potential customer base for an operator, then they’re more likely to go swiftly, and if the license is going to be available in two months, we have to be ready to go. We have had to learn a lot about the legislative process.
I think we have had a considerable change in our marketing activity, especially in the US. We have a new-found ability to let people know who we are. In the US, we are definitely establishing ourselves as one of the people to go to, the same as we have with Europe.
Asia is a different challenge. We’ve tried to support a reseller channel instead of doing direct sales in Asia because there is such a big cultural and language difference. We’ve probably been more successful at getting our name out there in the US, but Asia is doing well.
There is a big focus on our existing customer base and making sure we are ready for wherever they’re going next. A lot of our customers are multi-regional as well, so they will be facing different challenges in the US, Latin America, Asia and Europe at the same time. We need to be there to help them through that.
Continent 8 Technologies is proud to be the Official Networking Reception Sponsor at Sports Betting USA in New York City. Happening November 5-6, Sports Betting USA connects sport betting operators, suppliers, and service providers to New York’s media and finance professionals. The Continent 8 team looks forward to connecting with key industry players to discuss the expansion of the American sports betting market and how to maximize media channels for player acquisition and activation.
Now with 50 locations across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, Continent 8 Technologies is equipped to support all your gaming needs. With the opening of our new Continent 8 Data Center at the Atlantic City Convention Center this past June and our ever-expanding multi-state capacity, Continent 8 is the largest Cloud infrastructure provider for online gaming, sports betting, and eSports in the United States and beyond.
The data center at the Atlantic City Convention Center provides iGaming businesses with vital reliability, connectivity, security, and compliance as they expand across jurisdictions in the U.S. For more information on the Atlantic City Data Center and our multi-state expansion, visit atlanticcity-datacenter.com.
If you plan on attending Sports Betting USA and want to learn more about our recent expansion and the exciting opportunities in the American sports betting market, set up a meeting with team today.
Sports Betting USA
November 5-6, 2019
Metropolitan West
New York, 10001
Email: sales@continent8.com
Phone: +1 514 461 5111
Continent 8 is proud to be sponsoring SiGMA’19 on 27-29 November in Ta’Qali, Malta at the Malta Fairs & Exhibition Centre. With over 12,500 delegates in attendance, 400 sponsors, and 200 speakers, SiGMA’19 promises to be one of the year’s biggest iGaming events. Continent 8 looks forward to connecting with other industry leaders on the cutting edge of the iGaming industry.
As the “gateway to Europe,” Malta is at the forefront of the online gaming industry and home to some of the world’s largest online gaming businesses. Continent 8 is the only global data centre provider to offer fully redundant dual data centres within Malta.
Opened in 2007, our first facility is two miles from the Malta International Airport and five miles from the main commercial district. In 2016, an additional facility was opened, located just four miles from the airport.
Both sites offer high-quality co-location capabilities, as well as Continent 8’s standard product service suite, enabling customers to provision in-jurisdiction disaster recovery or “active-active” operations.
Headed to Malta for SiGMA’19? Don’t hesitate to set up a meeting with the team to discuss the latest developments in the iGaming industry!
Plan to attend
SiGMA’19
27-29 November
Malta Fairs & Exhibition Centre
Ta’Qali, Malta
Contact us
Email: sales@continent8.com
Phone: +44 1624 694625
Join the Continent 8 team at Asia Gaming Summit on 5-7 November in Taipei, Taiwan. This event provides the perfect environment to facilitate discussions on the latest regulatory updates, technological innovations and industry best practices.
If you’re interested in support for your online operations in Asia, Continent 8’s low latency network throughout Asia offers a consistent and reliable platform for serving your clients. In addition to co-location facilities, our network points of presence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore connect to the rest of the world over a high-capacity, fully-redundant private network. Continent 8 also offers highly reliable DDoS monitoring and mitigation services throughout Asia and around the world.
Will you be attending? Connect with the Continent 8 team at Asia Gaming Summit!
Asia Gaming Summit
5-7 November 2019
W Hotel- Taipei, Taiwan
Email: sales@continent8.com
+44 1624 694625
Continent 8 is thrilled to be returning to London for the EGR Operator Awards 2019 at Grosvenor House on 24 October. The EGR Operator Awards “reward B2C online gaming operators for setting the standard in categories ranging from customer service to social responsibility across all verticals.” We look forward to connecting with the giants of iGaming operations on this auspicious occasion.
Continent 8 is an award-winning, multi-jurisdictional global Cloud infrastructure solutions provider for online gaming, sports betting, and eSports. Our advanced data centres and high-quality networks support critical online operations in both private and public-sector organisations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Each connected location provides gaming operators with vital reliability, connectivity, security, and compliance as they expand across regulated markets.
Headed to London for the EGR Operator Awards? Don’t hesitate to set up a meeting with the team to discuss the latest developments in sports betting and the iGaming industry!
Plan to attend
EGR Operator Awards
Grosvenor House, London
24 October 2019
Contact us
Email:
sales@continent8.com
Phone: +44 1624 694625