Growth of the iGaming Market in the US: Continent 8 perspectives
In a recent podcast, SiGMA’s Mark Anthony Borg interviews Justin Cosnett, Chief Product Officer, and David Brace, Innovation Director at Continent 8 Technologies about the growth of the iGaming market in the US. Continent 8 Technologies is the world’s largest iGaming data centre and global network solutions provider. They provide high availability network solutions, managed services, and co-location for today’s online business-critical service platforms.
Continent 8 major milestones
The company has been around since the birth of the iGaming market at the start of the 21st century the company was providing rack and internet to power the online gaming boom. The company then migrated to Europe and Asia and added DDoS (distributed denial-of-service)protection and private network to support that kind of growing infrastructure requirement and then we came back to the US, first to be regulated and added cloud capability and a gaming exchange.
Responding to the growth of the U.S. market
David Brace says: “The major way Continent8 has responded to this growth in the iGaming market is by significant investment – ensuring we are first in every marketplace. …. We’ve deployed our own cloud technology in a number of states in the US…. We provide infrastructure that’s there for them to use and it circumvents any requirement for purchase of hardware and speeds everything up for everyone. The final thing for the US this year is going to be disaster recovery and business continuity. We’ve made a significant investment in opening up additional sites, allowing operators to deploy two platforms in a state – giving that kind of reassurance that if anything happens to any infrastructure or data in a primary location, they have a secondary location ready to go”.
The gaming exchange and the advantages it provides to customers
Justin Cosnett says that as part of providing DDoS protection for online gaming, the company collects a huge amount of net flow data of what internet endpoints are being used by its customers. Talking about the core of the gaming exchange, he adds: “We were seeing customers not connecting to just cloud and CDN providers, but also each other – a lot of activity takes place across the C8 Network. We’ve got a unique and advantageous position there. What we’ve managed to do therefore is create a private MPLS or Internet – it adds reliability and privacy, and it brings a reduced cost and outage potential to customers. That privacy means that there’s less surface area for a DDoS attack. We’re bringing a way for our customers and their partners to connect privately and not be as subject to DDoS attack.”
The company hopes to expand to other locations and other customers that aren’t currently within the C8 Network.
SiGMA’s Mark Anthony Borg (centre top) interviews Justin Cosnett, Chief Product Officer (bottom left), and David Brace, Innovation Director at Continent 8 Technologies (bottom right).
Addressing challenges of cyber-security, DDoS attacks and other threats
Justin Cosnett says that the cost to the industry in terms of downtime run in the millions, not to mention reputational damage. He says that the iGaming market has been viewed as an easy target and the growth of the industry in the U.S. has seen an increased incidence of attacks. “Having a private network limits the attack surface area and DDoS protection allows us to protect the internet access”. The company offers next generation antivirus and malware protections, helping customers to protect every endpoint.
David Brace expects the trend in the increase of cyberattacks to continue – not only in volume but also in complexity where attackers use one type of attack and simultaneously carry out another attack in the background. He adds, “the largest ever attack we witnessed against one of our customers, was actually the complexity. It was an attack that varied in type and one of the primary things the DDoS attack was used to do was actually to disguise the fact that people were trying to do credential staffing attacks and account takeovers. The big volume, big noise DDoS attack was disguising something more complex going on in the back end”.
Going into details about specific strategies they are adopting, Brace says that in addition to DDoS attacks and cybersecurity, the company is investing heavily in testing failover and mitigation plans:
“DDoS attacks and cyber security are one thing but then having the people, the processes and the technology behind to ensure you can continue working while you’re being attacked that’s where we’re looking to go”.
Continent 8: Looking into the future
The company has made significant investment in customer facing staff and bringing its technology and its products closer to the customer and is constantly looking for ways to improve speed of content delivery and agility.
Towards the conclusion of the podcast, the conversation turns to ChatGPT, and how the company is always looking at new technologies …. “ChatGPT is a big thing at the moment and we’re going to be looking closely at any kind of implementation of machine learning and artificial intelligence and how we could integrate those into our platforms”.
