By Peter Williams, Managing Director for Asia Pacific
As explored below, many aspects go to make the online gaming community successful and sustainable. An effective partnership for network security, performance, and server positioning is often overlooked. What good is a perfectly adapted user interface with rich features, if effective delivery to end-users is unachievable? The impact on revenue can be substantial in addition to inevitable client retention challenges.
Regulatory and Compliance
Choose a partner that understands your business. This is essential as the iGaming industry is extremely volatile with ever-changing landscapes. Influences beyond the control of your business can dictate a requirement for re-location or extension of services to alternative locations. The ideal partner would demonstrate a flexible contractual approach and be in a position to accommodate change.
Flexible Service Proposition
Partner solutions should map to the iGaming industry. Often global players serve all verticals and have inflexible services. Gaming companies require flexibility – co-locating primary services in specific locations to meet regulatory needs, but with integration to private and public clouds to allow burst or use in disaster scenarios. Management of niche network routes and performance is key – especially in Asia where consistency is a major challenge. The network partner should have an understanding of the markets you serve, your latency tolerance thresholds, and be in a position to back this up with a service level agreement (SLA).
Download time is a key component of end-user experience. If a site takes too long, users will go elsewhere. According to Kissmetrics a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. A site making $100,000 a day, could see $2.5million lost revenue each year. Mapping this to iGaming where loyalty is low and choice is high, the results would be far more damaging to the bottom line. To provide a consistent experience your network partner should have sufficient capacity and diversity to ensure network performance is consistent.
Security
Application and DDoS attacks come in many forms. Successful attacks can sink your business and poor defense comes at a huge cost. Your security partner should have sufficient capacity and effective tools to deal with attacks in real time. They should understand your traffic profile and mitigate without impacting end-users.
Capacity Planning
Finally, partners should have extensive global reach to places you need to be, which therefore allows expansion or re-location under a single partner agreement. They should have sufficient overhead to allow for unforeseen growth and volume spikes that occur during major sporting events.
In summary, selection should concentrate on flexibility, global reach, a service suite designed to meet requirements of iGaming, and have ample overhead for growth.
Source: iGB Asian Gaming Focus
