Online gambling operators need server solutions that work consistently, and most importantly when business picks up. That was a focus of the panel Karl Davies-Barrett, Global Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft Azure, sat on during the SiGMA Asia Digital conference, and our Stephanie Towers spoke with him after the event to gain more insight.

Davies-Barrett was happy with the way the conference went, and happily summed up some of the conversation for us. “It was a great discussion on a technical level, and it was nice to drill into the details of the challenges that gaming is facing,” he said. “You know whether they’re coming from compliance or just offering good customer service, it was all about data and was all about the throughputs, how to have a reliable platform, and it was just interesting to understand good architecture. It’s one thing to have good tools, but it’s how you use those tools. And the third takeaway was the openness that’s required, this portability of your solutions to go from on-premises, to cloud, and back again.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Af5Ov0Aw8?feature=oembed]

Microsoft has increasingly embraced the gambling sector, and Towers asked what Davies-Barrett has learned from our side of the fence. “So we have a lot of opportunity here, because you know, we do have not just cloud solutions for infrastructure, but for data provisioning,” he said. “We have open interfaces for our databases, such as Cosmos DB, where customers can come load up their data, then they can interrogate it with machine learning models which they train using Python. I think the key takeaway here is the openness of our platform. it’s an open source. cloud solution platform, and so that’s not kind of creating a vendor lock-in and it creates comfort. And the second area is the global scalability that Microsoft provides, you know we have over 54 data centres across the world, so an operator can literally pick and choose where do they want to deploy their solutions.”