In 2022, Continent 8 Technologies launched the Gaming Exchange, an exclusive community for iGaming businesses, allowing them to connect faster and more securely than through the standard internet, without requiring additional configuration.
In this blog, Justin Cosnett, Chief Product Officer at Continent 8, explores the product’s latest updates, its benefits and the future development plan. An important update is provided for Public Cloud customers – read on for more information!
Gaming Exchange is a private internet service that allows Continent 8 customers to connect directly to other Continent 8 customers via a virtual private network (VPN) through the company’s MPLS backbone network, bypassing the public internet. This type of service enables customers to share traffic at the lowest possible latency, ensuring secure and private communication.
Our current and new cloud customers will be pleased to learn that Gaming Exchange is now included as part of their Public Cloud platform, further differentiating this industry-leading service. Consequently, all Public Cloud customers will be included on Gaming Exchange, enjoying most of the service’s benefits – without any increase in bandwidth transfer fees. Note, the Premium Portal is not included as standard.
Customers will benefit from traffic being routed automatically via the quickest path available, whether through the public internet or Gaming Exchange.
Customers won’t have to take any action to benefit from this – Continent 8 will enable iGaming exchange seamlessly during a suitable scheduled maintenance window. This ensures that our Public Cloud customers will soon experience the benefits of private connectivity with other Continent 8 customers.
Gaming Exchange is specifically designed for the iGaming and online sports betting market to address four critical challenges.
Gaming Exchange allows various gaming businesses – including aggregators, data analysis providers, games providers, odd feeds, operators, payment gateways, platform providers, regulators, sportsbooks, among others – to connect securely to their operators, brands or each other. This extensive network also helps in expanding businesses reach, forming strategic partnerships and entering new markets.
Gaming Exchange delivers the fastest, most resilient and minimal latency connections, ensuring users benefit from the very best internet performance possible.
Gaming Exchange minimised the customer’s public attack surface area. By enabling connections over a private internet, it eliminates the threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where hackers inundate a network with artificial traffic, causing service interruptions and financial losses.
Gaming Exchange provides flexibility for businesses to scale their operations as they evolve with new technologies and market trends. This type of flexibility ensures long-term success and a competitive edge in a dynamic, fast-paced industry.
Any Continent 8 customer can join. The process is quite simple. For non-cloud customers, all we require is access to a physical port. We can provision it to them to get them onto Gaming Exchange within 24 hours. They will also have access to the Premium Portal so they can start monitoring and analysing traffic patterns and performance to make informed, data-driven decisions.
The industry is highly interconnected, and the demand for Gaming Exchange is increasing among gaming businesses – including payment providers and sports betting feeds – who recognise the platform’s privacy, latency, security and networking advantages. We intend to continue and expand these discussions.
We’re also exploring additional use cases for Gaming Exchange. Regulators, for instance, are interested in using Gaming Exchange for monitoring and reporting purposes, whether through data vaults or API access.
From a product perspective, we’ll soon be unveiling our new Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Object Storage services to the market. Both services have the potential to be integrated with Gaming Exchange and the Public Cloud. This integration means customers can access the CDN privately, directing their origin traffic through our network rather than through the public internet.
Gaming Exchange is opening new connectivity opportunities, and we’re happy to explore how it can provide iGaming and online sports betting customers with a groundbreaking private internet experience.
To learn more about Gaming Exchange for your iGaming and online sports betting operations, email sales@continent8.com or complete the Contact Us form.
Francisco Santos, Cloud Operations Manager at Continent 8 Technologies, alongside several of his colleagues in the global Cloud team, recently attended Nutanix .NEXT 2024. The event featured a full agenda of keynote presentations, game-changing breakouts, and hands-on demos, with a focus on how hybrid cloud unlocks the full potential of on-prem, private and public clouds.
Here, Francisco shares his key takeaways from the event.
I was really impressed with the .NEXT event. I attended a smaller version last November, but this full version provided a lot more information about new products, features, and partnerships.
I had a great time meeting with the Nutanix team, checking out new features for the Nutanix AHV virtualisation and Nutanix NCM multi-cloud management platforms, and learning about how other companies are using Nutanix. It was also interesting to explore the services available from partners like RedHat, Suse and Parallel.
The session was fantastic! We had over 100 attendees, and many people reached out afterward to learn more about our approach to building the multi-tenancy offering with Nutanix. The session covered how tenant operations are performed with NCM Self-Service, how to provide isolation with Flow Virtual Networking and VPCs, and even how to plan a migration from VMware to Nutanix AHV.
I think the session was timely given the recent changes to the new licensing model used by VMware Broadcom – a topic of concern for some. As a premier partner in Broadcom’s Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs), we not only help customers migrate from non-virtualized and existing VMware infrastructure to fully managed and compliant clouds but also provide cost savings through licensing scalability and 24/7 support capability.
During the event, I noticed that most of the topics revolved around containers, cybersecurity, AI and hybrid cloud as most of the companies are using public/private cloud to establish their environment and disaster recovery solutions. The use of containerised applications can assist customers in understanding how to decouple their applications and optimise their use of the public cloud.
Hybrid cloud and AI are consistently the main topics covered at most cloud events, and Nutanix has some intriguing solutions available.
Overall, this was certainly an informative event, with a lot of great takeaways and customer interest. I look forward to attending next year’s Nutanix .NEXT event.
Continent 8 offers a comprehensive cloud offering that can support any cloud-based iGaming and online sports betting environment, tailored to the customer’s specific project requirements.
Learn how our cloud team can help simplify, optimise and reimagine your hyperscale, hybrid, public multi-tenant and private single-tenant cloud infrastructure – contact us today!