Q&A: BetVictor CTO Jonathan De La Rosa outlines the operator’s 2017 tech plans
De La Rosa speaks exclusively to EGR Technology about how data analysis will play a key role next year
In the first of a two-part interview, BetVictor CTO Jonathan De La Rosa tells EGR Technology what he believes will be the key technology themes of 2017 and how the operator is improving its technology stack.
EGR Technology: What will be the key technology themes in the egaming industry in 2017 and why?
Jonathan De La Rosa (JDLR): In 2017, we will see egaming companies finally begin to understand the true value of big data. Whilst we have seen some business leaders take the lead in adopting a centralised data strategy, integrating data into the core of the business, we predict that this will be the key technology trend in 2017. All forward thinking and successful egaming companies will have data at the heart of their business next year.
EGR Technology: Will cybercrime continue to be a cause for the industry? What’s the best way to counter these attacks?
JDLR: Cybercrime will also be a key theme for 2017, Distributed Denial of Service attacks still exist and remain a major threat to egaming companies. The attacks, however, are now becoming more targeted such as brute force attacks against the digital channels targeting customer accounts.
The egaming community consists of excellent technologists and talented engineers. We, as a highly transactional ecommerce industry, should work together to combat these criminal activities.
EGR Technology: What is BetVictor’s tech focus for the year ahead?
JDLR: We have invested heavily in our big data platform over the past year. We have mastered the capturing and storing of large data sets from various sources, but the data platform has no value without analytics. In 2017, therefore, we will continue to ensure that we derive commercial value for that data; this is the exciting challenge that we at BetVictor are at the forefront of.
EGR Technology: How is BetVictor looking to improve its technological capabilities in 2017?
JDLR: We are constantly improving our technology stack focusing on these three pillars: resilience, scalability, and performance. In 2017 we will focus on the elasticity of our platform across our various on premise data centres and cloud providers utilising container strategies.
We are continuing to drive our initiatives around Infrastructure as Code, where our goal is to have immutable servers; this is when a server is deployed and is never modified just replaced with an updated instance and therefore avoids configuration drift. We are utilising Terraform and Ansible for our infrastructure orchestration and Docker as our container platform.