Different business sectors learning from one another is nothing new, and with betting and gaming, taking lessons from the intrinsically linked sports scene is unsurprising. 

What might be somewhat unusual to some observers, however, is the lessons betting can learn from certain sports; not in areas such as leadership and management, marketing or budgeting, but on cloud adoption.

Sharing his experience on the latest SBC Webinar, part of the Cloud Acceleration series, Nick Gibbs, Principal Consultant at Computacenter, explained synergies between his old career in Formula One and his new clients in wagering.

In his view, these synergies are the need for agility, to reduce the time taken to deliver products, results and services, and ultimately deliver a high performance and reliable platform regardless of location.

“F1 really is a unique environment, but I’ve definitely found that a lot of the challenges were similar to the ones we hear about from some of the businesses I work with now at Computacenter,” he explained.

Providing a breakdown of how multi-cloud providers actually provide these services to operators, Fred Lherhault, Field CTO EMHe EA & Emerging at Pure Storage, highlighted three ‘pillars’. 

These are multi-cloud storage and data management platforms, helping customers make a data centre feel like a public cloud, and offering a subscription run.

He said: “I think one of the reasons it resonates with customers and the gaming and betting industries is that because they need to operate in different locations, not all cloud providers are available in every location.”

The main benefit of this, he continued, is that it enables firms to say ‘if tomorrow we’ve got to go on-prem or we’ve got to go AWS or Azure because that’s what’s available in a specific location, we know that we’ll be able to deploy and use applications in the same map’.

For operators active across various jurisdictions via extensive brand portfolios, reliability is also a key area of concern, that being that a platform is always consistent. 

Gibbs observed that, as with F1, adopting a multi-cloud product can ‘take the pressure off’ on the day of major events, resulting in a high-quality performance that ultimately benefits and retains the customer.

“All of the sub-teams within an F1 Group demand the highest levels of performance from their supporting infrastructure,” he said.

“If they can provide more bandwidth, more Iops and less latency, then the engineers can output their work faster, they can output their work faster and they can get more components built in less time. 

“Crucially, they can spend more time analysing the results that they see, and having more thinking time means more informed decisions.”

Also appearing on the webinar was Paul Nearn, Computacenter’s Solution Leader – Platform & Hybrid IT, who asserted with confidence that ‘the time is now’ for multi-cloud platforms, as he sees even experienced customers facing hurdles in their ‘cloud journey’.

“Multiple skill resources are needed to manage this,” Nearn remarked. “These cloud resources are often expensive, they often leave and can be contractors, it can be a shallow pull. We often see a lack of connectivity between those businesses that want to connect those pieces.”