Customer: Intralot S.A.
Country: Greece
Industry: Gaming
Organization Size: Large (5,000 employees worldwide)
Products & Services: Microsoft Azure, ASR, Azure Security Center, Azure Monitoring
Date: February 2019 – April 2019
Customer Profile
Intralot, was found in 1992 and has been the leading player in gaming. Since the establishment, Intralot has been a leading gaming solutions supplier and operator active in 48 regulated jurisdictions around the globe. The company has significant experience by providing future-proof solutions to licensed operators around the world. Intralot employs more than 5,200 people and maintains the highest security certifications. The company as member of the UN Global Compact, is a global corporate citizen committed to sustainable development, and is an active proponent of the principles of responsible gaming, possessing the WLA Responsible Gaming Framework Certificate. Intralot is also one of the first companies in the gaming industry globally certified under the ISO 37001 standard for anti-bribery management systems.
Situation
Intralot S.A. main purpose was to ensure the safe transition of all specialized critical applications and services of Intralot S.A. in the Microsoft Azure environment. There was an immediate need for this smooth and rapid transition to a modernize IAAS-(Infrastructure-As-A-Service) environment, which offers not only high availability, but also easier accessibility and advanced data security.
In particular, the project was about the transition of Hyperion and IGLBF services, through IAAS – (Infrastructure-As-A-Service) approach to the Microsoft Azure environment. Office Line Cloud Team rehosted 5 Windows Servers to Azure.
Office Line being a certified provider of Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), recommended an end to end Disaster Recovery plan in order to ensure Intralot S.A. business continuity.
Solution
Intralot’s partnership with Office Line S.A. focuses mainly on the implementation of Microsoft Azure Cloud services in order to relocate Hyperion and IGLBF production services.
More specifically, Intralot’s need for the modernization of IGBLF and Hyperion applications and services that fully integrates the functionality of the affiliated companies in order to ensure the maximum degree of its business continuity, was imperative. The immediate response of Office Line ensured the safe transition and high availability by using the cutting-edge technologies of Azure IAAS and Microsoft ASR.
- The main purposes were:
- Upgrade services that were on “on premise” environment, in Microsoft Azure IAAS infrastructure focusing on manageable performance. As a result, I reduced the costs and gained effective and high availability of applications and infrastructure.
- Reduction of operational and IT costs, regarding the hardware devices needed for every application. Everything can be run through the integrated platform for administration and monitoring.
- Employee flexibility and productivity increasement by providing the ability of the direct access to business services and company’s data through all the subsidiaries, enhancing the overall performance.
- Azure Security Center service activation, optimizing the use of the security files from the applications, covering the organization’s security needs.
- Azure AD Premium service activation, in order to use a set of user identity management tools, as well as access control mechanisms through the Azure platform. Software configuration so that the possibilities provided by the integration of the mechanisms of Intune and Azure AD Premium (conditional access, MFA) are fully utilized, covering a wide range of secure access scenarios to the offered applications. A good example is that MFA was implemented in order both administrators and users to have access to applications.
Benefits
- With Windows Azure, the focus is on the development, not the infrastructure.
- Key benefits of hosting applications in Azure include:
- Reduced investment on IT infrastructure
- No need to buy / maintain any infrastructure.
- Easy scale-up and scale down in “Pay-As You-use” model
- Windows Azure provides SLA 99.95% for the hosted applications
Specifically, Azure Security Center strengthen Intralot’s security posture and protect it against threats, ensuring compliance with the highest security standards.
Furthermore, by implementing Azure Site Recovery (AZURE ASR), Intralot scientifically reduced the cost of deploying, monitoring, patching, and maintaining on premises disaster recovery infrastructure and eliminated the need for building or maintaining a costly secondary datacenter.
- With the successful implementation of the project, Intralot has also secured significant financial benefits:
- Higher productivity levels from the IT Dept, due to reduced management duties
- Cost effectiveness due to on-premises investments cost reduction
- Increased return on investment (ROI) and cash flow arising from Capex and Opex reduction
- Business processes modernization and better performance due to elasticity, scalability and efficiency offered by Microsoft Azure Cloud solutions
