Gambling prepares Resilient and Secure Cloud Technology for Banks

Banks, Payment Service Providers and regulators are indebted to the Gambling Industry for continuingly improving the resilience and security of Cloud Technology. For example, EU has DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) which requires a 4 hour for reporting a major incident but no later than 24 hours. If an online gaming service goes down 10 minutes before the start of a horse race that is a catastrophic event. 

Taking Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong as an example, where over 90% of the bets occur in the final ten minutes before the start of the race. Online access to any competitive wagering worldwide, worth billions of dollars, cannot be a gamble on poor reliability. This upsets the punters - even more so if their bet was in the money - bookmakers whose lively hood is threated - shareholders in the gaming industry as their equity drops - a reminder of the capricious nature of the investment. Reliance, security and speed are keys.

The gaming industry is transforming cloud technology by providing:

• No single point of failure – difficult to say about legacy banking systems as they may or may not been backed up. Compliance audits show the right boxes have been ticked and the backups should work. Testing the back up for a payment system involves switching from the main system to the backup but what happens if it cannot be switched back? No body wins in the ensuring chaos so best not try.

• Excellent documentation – given the age of many banking core systems and the freedom allowed to change programming code this can and does go wrong. One incident in the UK resulted in millions of customers being denied access to their accounts and two years later the bank was fined $60 million. The technicians who performed the software upgrade on Tuesday and only able to perform a successful batch run until the following Friday. Over 80% of the banking industry use batch.

• Cloud technology architecture is now not monolithic allowing for:

• • Country and region-specific areas – also good for in-country data protection
  • Online restoration of bugs
  • Fast recovery in events of failure – system operating standard is 99.99%
  • AI and API are increasingly ingrained 

Cloud System Architecture is now componentised

Summary

Contrast between legacy banking systems and modern gambling platforms is the most telling. While banks often avoid testing backup systems due to switching risks, gambling operators must have bulletproof failover capabilities because down time during peak betting periods would be catastrophic. This necessity has pushed cloud architecture toward true redundancy rather than theoretical compliance. Cloud also provides rapid recovery often near real time. The gambling industry’s experience with fraud detection and real-time risk assessment again becomes is valuable and available within cloud technology.  

It's a timing issue. Banks went international with Telex, wire transfers and Correspondent Banking (four banks involved making international transactions). Gambling’s international expansion has the internet, instant global telephone connections, smartphones and now a fit for purpose Cloud Technology.