Power Up: How Data Centres Support The Growth Of Online Gaming

As anyone who frequently peruses the pages of Silicon – or any other tech publication for that matter – will know, cyber security has become the dominant issue for businesses in all industries.

Today’s rapidly developing threat landscape means that security teams are having to deal with more noise than ever before and businesses are frequently turning to cloud-based tools to detect and respond to cyber attacks.

Staying secure

“Security must also be top of the agenda for game developers,” declared Rodriquez. He cited a recent developer study which found that 84 percent of gaming companies were targeted by hackers in 2016, data theft affected one in every six games, and  two in three experienced a DDoS attack.

He continued: “For developers to mitigate DDoS attacks at scale, and protect in-game data and transactions – a cloud-based defence system is crucial. The elasticity of the cloud means that large volumes of DDoS traffic can be absorbed and diverted to the edge, enabling gameplay to carry on as normal.

“DDoS traffic can also be diverted through cloud-based scrubbing centres, which filter out illegitimate traffic and pass clean traffic to the origin site. Cloud-based web application firewalls are needed too, to prevent against remote file inclusion, SQL injections, malicious robots and cross-site scripting. This multi-layered approach is essential. If you don’t have a secure game, you don’t have a game at all.”

Cloud computing has already become a key component of cyber security and the area will certainly continue to develop as tools become more advanced and incorporate technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For the online gaming world – as with any other industry – security needs to be built in from the outset. That’s a lesson that no-one wants to have to learn the hard way.

Quiz: What do you know about video game technology?