Sisal chooses Aruba for cloud gaming

Dedicated Cloud and distributed colocation to support always-available global services.

The customer

Sisal's story begins in 1946 with the friendship of three journalists and their dream of bringing Italian sport back to life. That's how they invented the Schedina Totocalcio, a game that has always held a place in Italians' memory: created to help rebuild stadiums in the post-war years, it was from the very start a symbol of hope and the desire to come together.

Since then, Sisal has never stopped innovating and expanding, both in the retail sector with a network of nearly 40,000 points of sale and in the digital world. Over more than 70 years of activity, Sisal has built a relationship of trust and credibility with consumers, designing and managing games with expertise, transparency and security, fully in line with the standards set by the Customs and Monopolies Agency and by leading international bodies on Responsible Gaming.

Sisal is a major Italian Group whose strategic pillars are innovation, retail development, social responsibility and sustainability. Today, Sisal is also a leading player abroad: through a careful internationalization strategy, the company has successfully developed new business opportunities in Morocco, Spain and Turkey.

The need

Sisal needed robustness, native scalability and best-of-breed technologies to support its digital evolution.

The solution

Dedicated cloud and colocation active across two data centers in active-active mode, with private cages and dedicated Aruba teams.

The benefits

Rating 4 certified data centers, industrialized DevOps processes and a single point of contact for cloud and Trust Services.

The need

A gaming infrastructure to industrialize

As part of its overall innovation and digital evolution strategy, Sisal decided it was worth launching a process to rethink its IT infrastructure in order to capture the relevant benefits: gaining access to "best of breed" technologies; adopting industrialized operations processes in line with market best practices; raising robustness and security levels; and offering native scalability and flexibility in executing project activities.

To implement this strategy, it decided to rely on a trusted partner able to provide cutting-edge data centers and infrastructure and always open to ongoing dialogue.

The solution

Dedicated cloud and colocation across two data centers

Sisal chose Aruba as its reference service provider, defining a hybrid solution of dedicated cloud and colocation within private cages. To boost redundancy, the services were located across two Aruba data centers in Italy — DC IT3 in Ponte San Pietro, in the province of Bergamo, and DC IT1 in Arezzo.

The project involves migrating Sisal's Gaming-related services to a dedicated cloud infrastructure provided by the two data centers: both are, in fact, production sites, and Sisal can choose which one to deliver a given service or application from.

In particular, some services are provided in active-active mode, meaning from both sites simultaneously, maximizing resilience and optimal use of the infrastructure. In order to meet 100% of the company's requirements in terms of security and protection, the colocation service was also added, provided through private cages dedicated to Sisal's other applications and services.

A dedicated network infrastructure was also created to establish connections between Sisal's premises and Aruba's data centers, using high bandwidth and complete solution redundancy. Aruba provided a team of dedicated Solution Architects, Service and Project Managers, and Account Managers who followed Sisal's individual needs throughout the various stages of the project's development.

The solution implemented was designed on an ad hoc basis, fully customized to Sisal's needs as a gaming-industry company, offering a mix of IT environments tailored to specific requirements, while ensuring the same operational and security standards across all environments, even where they differ from one another.

Added to this was a further challenge involving the Sisal team's DevOps skills: an in-depth collaboration and exchange of expertise was launched between Sisal and Aruba's IT team, with the goal of acquiring greater management and governance capabilities and a more dynamic approach suited to the cloud solutions adopted.

The benefits

Maximum resilience for a gaming giant

Thanks to the project, Sisal no longer depends on on-premise infrastructure and can rely, on one hand, on all the IT expertise of the Enterprise division, and on the other, on a top-tier infrastructure network based on ANSI/TIA Rating 4 certified data centers, which guarantee maximum redundancy and compliance with the highest resilience standards.

The benefits can be seen in terms of flexibility, both technological and cost-related, thanks to a structure that allows Sisal to better manage the delivery of its services, especially during peak market periods, and to agilely scale its infrastructure in line with its growth path; data security and protection thanks to the high level of the data centers as well as the IT architecture built for the project; and the adoption of industrialized operations processes, thanks to the adoption of DevOps methodologies and the services offered by an expert provider such as Aruba.

In addition, Sisal can focus on its core activities, delegating the burden of managing its IT infrastructure to Aruba.

Relying on a partner like Aruba also offers the opportunity to implement the solution with further types of services — such as Automatic Signature and Time Stamping services, which are used every time a bet is placed: this allows Sisal to have a single point of contact for all its various needs, whether related to the cloud world or to Trust Services.

"For Sisal, guaranteeing maximum data security has always been a central element of our ICT strategy, one we intend to keep investing in. At this time of strong company expansion, including into international markets, we felt the need to find a model capable of adapting to change, guaranteeing scalability, flexibility in project activities, and the highest information security standards".

Mario MartinelliChief Information Officer of Sisal S.p.A.

Future developments

The complexity of the project to migrate two entire data centers from on-premise to Aruba's infrastructure — which guarantees full 24/7 service continuity and supports evolving business plans — over a period of 24 months is a challenge of exceptional significance that the two organizations are carrying forward with an increasingly strong partnership.