The online gaming industry is booming. With over 1.2 billion projected online gamers by 2027 (Statista), this rapid growth has brought significant opportunities as well as challenges for gaming companies.
One company capitalizing on this growth is Greentube. Today it is one of the biggest online gaming development companies in Europe and a worldwide operator of casinos and game halls. The company offers products such as classic slots, video poker games and social casino games to 25 million consumers and 120 business to business partners worldwide.
Navigating a Complex Regulatory Landscape
Greentube operates in highly regulated markets. “As a gaming company, our entire business is based on real money, real games and real players. This means we deal with a huge amount of regulatory and data privacy laws which have a considerable impact on our IT infrastructure,” says Branislav Dudic, team leader, IT Infrastructure, Greentube.
To ensure data sovereignty and compliance with regulations like GDPR, Greentube must adhere to stringent local laws. These often mandate that player data be stored within specific geographic boundaries. This requirement can range from on-premises data centers to public cloud solutions, depending on the country’s specific regulations.
As Greentube grew—expanding into new countries with unique regulatory requirements—its IT infrastructure became increasingly complex, difficult to manage and less easy to scale.
“We’re a longtime user of VMware solutions, but there was no one point of management to control our diverse set of products and environments. The IT infrastructure underpins our worldwide gaming platform, so we had to fix this,” says Dudic.
Greentube wanted common tools and a common architecture to mitigate the challenges of scaling in line with regulations. The company turned to VMware Cloud Foundation, the private cloud platform offered by Broadcom, to establish a consistent environment across its global on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
Consolidation, Compliance And Control
With the solution in place, Dudic and his team can manage multiple Greentube environments from a single pane of glass. This helps consolidate management tasks and simplify operations.
“As soon as VMware Cloud Foundation was in place, we had one place to see many different features. We can scale, manage, upgrade and share all in one place. This holistic view significantly helps the business,” says Dudic.
From a business growth and compliance perspective—because VMware Cloud Foundation supports private and hybrid cloud deployments—it’s much easier and faster for Greentube to set up in new markets while adhering to diverse data sovereignty regulations. Centralized policy management ensures compliance and security standards are uniformly applied across the infrastructure.
“By leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities, we’ve reduced the likelihood of security breaches and compliance violations,” says Dudic.
VMware Cloud Foundation has also improved Greentube’s ability to monitor and manage capacity, preventing overprovisioning or underutilization. The team is enjoying high levels of automation and operational efficiency which has removed a huge workload burden off the team.
Accelerating Developer Velocity
Greentube leverages VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service and VMware Tanzu Platform in VMware Cloud Foundation to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters via self-service, improving staff efficiency and simplifying workflows.
“Our development teams wanted to publish games in the Kubernetes environment, so we introduced VMware Tanzu Platform. Because it is optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation, we have been able to accelerate application delivery and quickly provide the types of games our customers are looking for,” says Dudic.
Longer term, Dudic’s team will complete the integration of its 11 global data centers to VMware Cloud Foundation, further reducing management overhead and avoiding lengthy hardware procurement lead times.
“It’s an exciting time for my team and for the company, and we’re ready for further growth. We’re glad to have Broadcom with us on our journey,” says Dudic.
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