NEOGAMES

SELA WINS AZURE MIGRATION NEOGAMES' ON-PREM DATA CENTER TO AZURE

Customer profile – NeoGames is a public company (since Nov 2020) trades in NASDAQ Global Market. The company is a technology-driven innovator and a global provider of iLottery solutions for national and state-regulated lotteries with comprehensive platforms and innovative games portfolio. Sela has a track record of over 3 decades in leading the consulting and technology knowledge in Israel. Sela, as an MSP helped NeoGames reaching their business goals on Microsoft Azure. NeoGames business problems that were tackled Sela was approached by NeoGames to help them to build a new cloud infrastructure environment by migrating their existing on-premise datacenter into a managed cloud platform. In addition, conducting the necessary upgrades and transformations to make the application cloud-ready by an extensive modernization project. An application migration plan was prepared stating phases of application assessment, migration strategy and implementation. The assessment phase involved of eliciting information about the application components, its technology stack, deployment architecture, application dependencies, performance needs and other non-functional requirements. Based on the assessment, a migration strategy was adopted to migrate the application. Our SMEs, together with Microsoft Architects and NeoGames engineers identified the following challenges:

1. Identify and characterize new infrastructure models and challenges.
2. Covid-19 pandemic crisis: Financial challenges alongside with adjusting to remote work method and collaboration.
3. NeoGames legal and regulation requirements.
4. Integrating data process from the on premises datacenter to new public cloud environment.
5. Current architecture had to be modified to support larger scale.
6. Ensuring business continuity for NeoGames during the migration process.

 

NEOGAMES HAD A PROBLEM:

NeoGames, as a business that operates in a highly regulated industry, has to be fully compliant with the highest regulations strands, security protocols and privacy requirements.

 

HOW DOES SELA HELP?

Sela has a unique positioning as an SI, a Software House and a Training Partner. This enables us to give a 360 to the client from the Infrastructure, through DevOps, to the Data and Development, not only giving them the best solution, but also to make a transformation within the teams, by providing a comprehensive knowledge transfer and a state of mind transformation. We at SELA believe we should forget about “Lift & Shift”, it is not a unique enough solution and it leaves the conversation around pricing. You can Win Compere in some cases, but even if you do that, other vendors will win back eventually. We found that the best competitive solution and the most robust one is “Lift & Transform”. We find the best business and technology solution for customers needs. Usually it involves in Azure PaaS elements, in most cases a combination of Big Data, AI, Containers and specific Azure native components (AKS / Azure SQL / Cosmos DB / Data lake / ML / etc.). This “Transformation” from IaaS into PaaS and Services brings the best of Azure, both in technology and pricing and increases the client’s stickiness in scale. In addition, SELA has developed unique IPs of its own: OneDrop (http://msp.sela.co.il/onedrop.html), Dr. Dump (http://www.sela.co.il/Products#_drdump) and 3 DevOps tools (Scrat - http://www.sela.co.il/Products#_scrat, WimBi http://www.sela.co.il/Products#_wimbi, WiMigrator - http://www.sela.co.il/Products#_wimigrator).

 

THE SOLUTION AREAS

The solution covered the following areas: Open Source, Micro-Services, Modern Workplace, Data and AI, and Infrastructure solutions.

THE MAIN BENEFITS ACHIEVED

• The service we provided enabled NeoGames to meet higher standards of regulation, which enabled them the opportunity of offering their services to a larger number of national and state-regulated lotteries, potentially growing significantly their business
• The process of moving to Azure cloud platform has been a huge success, and as a result- NeoGames is considering moving additional on-premise environments to the public cloud in different locations in the United States and Europe.
• Due to the global COVID-19 crisis the process of digitalization and modernization has accelerated, and the project schedule was shortened.
• Reduced on-premise infrastructure costs by better and accurate sizing, moving to a pay-as-you-go model and optimize cloud spending with built-in cost management tools.
• NeoGames' IT team has acquired extensive knowledge and experience in management and development on the Azure platform which allows them to move forward and upload more cloud environments and workloads.
• Improved SLA, resiliency, security and efficiency.

THE MAIN TECHNOLOGIES THAT WERE INVOLVED IN THE SOLUTION

• SELA’s experts delivered the following infrastructure solution for NeoGames (All the below technologies were deployed over NeoGames’ new Azure subscription):
• Established these services and components in order to create the data process from the Local Data Center to Azure
• Data Factory
• API Management
• Azure SQL Managed instance
• Express Route
• Azure Virtual Machine scale set
• Azure Cache for Redis