Swisslos needed modern, software-defined systems to keep pace with the unpredictable loads on IT infrastructures the lottery business can generate. When jackpots grow to large sums, public interest and web traffic can spike. This was a challenge for its hardware-constrained infrastructure.
“We couldn’t adequately balance peak loads and offer the required flexibility and automation,” said Joris Vuffray, Head of Network and System Management for Swisslos. “The lack of elasticity was impacting our ability to deliver our services to customers of our internet
gaming platform.”
Swisslos was unable to scale its capacity quickly due to the time required to configure and deploy physical appliances. Swisslos required software-defined solutions for load balancing and web application security and discovered Avi Networks could provide both.
“Swisslos was able to deploy the Avi solution within two hours,” Vuffray said. “We quickly saw the advantages: the load balancer and WAF are extremely user-friendly, Avi’s analytics give an immediate picture of application performance and the solutions were designed from the ground up for automation.”
Swisslos also cut its costs by 60 per cent compared to the previous vendor and application troubleshooting now takes less than half the time than was required using the old solutions.
“Unlike hardware-confined tools that are discrete, manual and resource-intensive, Avi Networks provides visibility, automation and control that scales with applications across any environment. Our application delivery and iWAF solutions deliver elasticity, intelligence and cost-savings,” said Frank Mild, Director Central Europe at Avi Networks. “We’re very happy that we could support the Swisslos IT team with its task of architecting a modern data center, replacing legacy hardware with software-defined components — enabling them to serve their customers better.”