Tipico has grown from a single betting shop in Germany to one of the leading European betting providers, and is headquartered in Malta. It offers a range of online sports betting products for mobile, and has a chain of around 1,200 betting shops in Germany and Austria.
In the competitive sports betting sector, user experience is vital for retaining a loyal customer base. Tipico’s former datacentre was not sufficiently reliable to properly support business operations, so a programme of transformation was planned to overhaul its IT and network estate.
Robert Rychlik, Tipico’s Director of Technology, recalls: “The servers and the networking and communications we were running needed to be significantly improved. Application and data availability weren’t as high as we needed it to be, and at times of peak demand we were facing real issues.
“So we made the decision to move to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacentre in Dublin, Ireland. We knew this would be a complex and challenging migration process, so we needed to find a network provider that would be capable of supporting it.”
At the same time, Tipico wanted to move some of the corporate tools that were running at its European and South American branch offices, such as financial apps, to the cloud. To make sure employees in all locations had reliable access to vital data and applications in the cloud on an ongoing basis, it needed a high-performance network from a provider it could trust and rely on.
To migrate Tipico’s apps and data from its former data centre to the AWS data centre in Dublin, Lumen installed temporary secure, high-capacity direct connections between the two sites.
On an ongoing basis, Lumen Cloud Connect provides secure, high-performance direct connections between Tipico’s office locations and its AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services.
“We needed highly reliable communications between both sides as the migration would take several days once it was underway and needed to be seamless,” says Rychlik.
“We chose Lumen as I had worked with the company (then Level 3 Communications) in a previous role and had a good experience of its cloud connectivity offering.
“We looked at the providers that could help us with such a complex migration, and who was best placed to build out our MPLS cloud connectivity in the longer term. It was an easy decision, because Lumen stood out from its competitors in the market in Europe.”
Lumen also provides flexible, reliable WAN connectivity between Tipico’s locations. This improves network performance and makes it easier for new sites to be added as the business grows.
“Security is the number one benefit for us, as it reduces risk for our company,” says Chygarkin. “Cloud Connect provides the minimum possible surface area for malicious attacks, as the connection between AWS and our on-prem datacentre isn’t visible.” This helps to protect the company’s data, reputation and revenue.
“We have decreased RTT (Round Trip Time) between AWS and our datacentre, which is ideal for our latency-sensitive services.” This level of performance means Parimatch’s users receive a great online experience, helping to make sure its customers stay loyal and continue using Parimatch’s online platform.
European Betting Provider
— Robert Rychlik, Director of Technology, Tipico