Benefits Of Cloud Computing For Online Gaming Industry

Technology evolves rapidly and so does it’s usage in various domains. With an increasingly online world, cloud computing makes every business accessible from anywhere and at anytime.

The impact on gaming, traditional businesses as well as arcades and casinos is substantial with the deployment of cloud services. When the traditional IT infrastructure used a client-server model with emphasis on presence of centralized hardware, cloud computing makes it decentralized thereby improving reliability.

Online gaming industry including casinos with different features and games like Platinum Play online slots and more too make use of such architecture. With the advent of cheaper Internet everywhere, more and more players and customers leverage this technology and play online.

Same goes for multiplayer gaming and eSports. What used to be a non-viable choice before Internet became cheaper is now an industry in itself with tournaments and awards for those who compete and win. Players from all around the world can enjoy gaming and these gaming servers too use cloud computing to a great extent.

Benefits of cloud computing:

A telling benefit of cloud computing is the reduction in support costs and improved reliability. The traditional client-server model required a higher number of on-site IT staff to maintain and support the whole model while cloud computing makes it somewhat redundant. Simply have a cluster of virtual machines which can shrink or grow as per computing needs and as these are virtual, the actual hardware used is reduced.

The biggest advantage in terms of users is that it makes a service device independent. There is no need to use or install a stand-alone software. Since it is hosted in the cloud (Software as a Service – SaaS), only an Internet connectivity and a web browser is needed. This actually removes the need of having a minimum system requirements criteria in most cases.

Example: Using Office 365 which is a cloud based service can be accessed from a browser as well as a program. So it is device independent and easy to use.

Other advantage is that patches can be applied directly in the cloud instead of having them individually on user machines.

So, it is easy to see the potential uses of cloud based computing.

Broadly the deployment using cloud infrastructure is divided into :

Public : Publicly accessible services using cloud (like web services like Gmail or storage like DropBox) come in this category.

Private : This is for internal use in companies. Sensitive client data as well as other information is for company use only and can’t be accessed from outside.

Hybrid : This combines best of both the worlds (public and private). Some part of deployment is available as a public cloud while the other is private. This is typically used in consulting firms where there requires an interface between private and public communication as well as information sharing.

Community: This is actually similar to public cloud but the infrastructure is shared. So, it is cheaper as more than one organization makes use of the same cloud architecture. Security obviously would be a key point when designing such an architecture.

A typical cloud architecture involves a front end (user facing), a back-end(database), a billing infrastructure and a message queue which regulates these elements.

[ Image courtesy : Wikimedia ]

As with most technology, cloud computing too has it’s challenges – security being a key one. When a distributed architecture like cloud is used, along with redundancies also come the multiple sources from where data can be breached.

So having a cloud infrastructure which is robust yet cheap can be tricky and needs to evolve with changing organizational needs. The trend is clear, it will be cloud computing for all the services with many changes and potentially secure improvements.

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