Can Cloud Technology be Game-Changing for Fantasy Sports?
Future of Fantasy Sports一 Part 3
This article is third part of the series “Future of Fantasy Sports” where implications pertinent to cloud technology would be talked about and how fantasy sports industry can make most out of it to stay in the game. We would focus on how to transform technological infrastructure of a company so that it is can be manipulated and be used as a strength. So make a hot cup of coffee, and have fun reading!
Every startup’s dream is to be called a unicorn or decacorn! The secret to become a unicorn lies in the core infrastructure of the company. The technology, marketing, PR, operations have to run strong. If even one goes down, the infrastructure may fall weak. The art lies in striking a utopian balance between all the factors.
On the technological forefront, cloud computing is bringing about great deal of elasticity within the system. Before we get into the details, let’s have a little primer on cloud technology:
In layman’s terms, cloud computing means to use some other company’s more sophisticated computer to give power to your own needs. In return for their services, you’d pay them.
For example, you want to play a hi-fi game which requires great deal of RAM on your computer and you don’t have it. So instead, you’d download the game application on your desktop like any other application and in turn, this application would be using another computer in the background which has required amount of RAM thereby rendering you the same experience without you bumping up your hardware. With that being said, cloud technology can be used to create new applications and services, store, back up or recover data, host websites/blogs, stream audio/video, deliver software on demand, and just about anything you do on your computer.
With this we can draw following inferences (as benefits of cloud):
- Cost: A cloud solution is really economical because it eliminates the need to buy extra sophisticated hardware/software for the system.
- Speed: Vast amount of computational resources can be allocated to your application within minutes, which means you’d enjoy luxury of powerful machinery without actually owning one.
- Scalability: As and when your application requires more or less bandwidth, that can be altered elastically on the go. If at some point in time your application sees a great surge in traffic, the cloud will allocate more resources automatically and the same resources will be withdrawn when the traffic reduces.
- Productivity: This guarantees more productivity of your IT personnel as their energy won’t go in managing resources but on focusing on important business goals.
- Performance: The performance guaranteed would be modern with best of processors which would certainly make the end user happy thereby increasing revenue.
- Reliability: Cloud computing makes data backup, recovery faster so that business continues without any worries.
As a case study, let’s take up FanDuel. Started in 2009, the UK based unicorn has grown to be one of the biggest leaders in the world of fantasy sports. FanDuel has a base of one million active paying users. There are multiple games being played on their platform everyday which means the company’s technology has to be resilient enough to sustain spikes in traffic. Such hours during the day are very critical for business. If the platform suffers an outage, it would not only cost the company its reputation but also huge amount of revenue. Hence, the IT infrastructure has to deal with growing number of users effectively. Scalability and elasticity along with speed and splendid performance are important to keep the user experience good.
The solution was to move the FanDuel platform from their own servers to cloud servers which would manage the resources themselves. FanDuel chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud computer. So effectively, FanDuel runs on AWS servers.
This being said, it becomes imperative in every industry to explore all technologies because you never know what fits your needs. Sometimes taking help of IT consultant may also be very beneficial for company’s business point of view. Cloud computing offers great deal of resources at very reasonable costs. It’s great opportunity for the startups which have superb ideas but lack of hardware resources to set up their own server racks to use the technology of cloud.
The cloud technology is empowering the young budding companies by giving them an equal chance to rise. This is how true inclusion is taking place. All one needs is an open mind and willingness to learn more about modern-day technology and everything is possible!
