Why Bet365 CIO Martin Davies isn't chancing it with 'fashionable' technology

Davies doesn't believe DevOps, BYOD or a hybrid cloud suit the nature of the online gambling firm's business

Bet365 has more than 14 million customers in 200 different countries. It employs over 2,000 people, with more than a quarter of staff working in the IT department. But just because technology is a huge part of the business, doesn't mean the company's CIO, Martin Davies, is convinced that the firm has to adopt the latest "hot" technologies.

"One of the biggest problems with IT is that it is very fashion driven... we're in a world now where we are getting a lot of flip-flopping from one thing to another. It's almost like if Captain Kirk's Enterprise gets shot by a torpedo and he just runs from one side of the bridge to another, because he's following the latest trends," he tells Computing.

One of those trends is DevOps, and Davies believes that while the approach may suit certain businesses, it's not a solution for every enterprise.

"[The reason you can't see a bank having a DevOps team] is because it is regulated, and you can't just make changes without the firm going through very controlled circumstances. Bet365 is in the same space; we are heavily regulated and every change we make has to be justified and has to go through a very controlled process," says Davies.

Being regulated by the British Gambling Commission is one reason why the firm may not be able to make drastic changes swiftly, but security is a key concern for Davies as well.

Take bring-your-own-device (BYOD) schemes, for example, which many companies have introduced to both give their employees more freedom and flexibility and cut their mobile IT bill. Davies, however, believes BYOD is fraught with risks.

"BYOD says to me ‘bring your own security threat' ... I really can't see the benefits of BYOD, if I'm honest."

Bet365's mobile developers are issued with all the devices they need to test their code, he says, adding that he cannot see a time when staff will be allowed to use their personal devices.

But while Davies' aversion to DevOps and BYOD is understandable, what's more surprising is that the company only recently deployed a Wi-Fi network.

"Wireless is just another extension of your attack surface from a security perspective. We've started allowing it but it is very segregated from the main network and it is very tightly controlled," says Davies.

"The only reason that we've brought it in is because we do a lot more development on mobile and tablets and it makes it difficult for us to test these things internally without having wireless," he adds.

The company has what Davies calls a sophisticated system that can detect access points, so that if anybody does try to bring in a device and connect it to the network without permission, the company can lock them out.

"There are people wanting to do bad things to companies so you have to be vigilant with what goes on in your business to ensure you don't have potentially serious situations cropping up," Davies says.

"If you compare a site like Reddit being hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army to Bet365 being hacked, there is a big difference because we deal with customers' money on a daily basis, so the damages could be huge, and this is why security has to be at the forefront of everything all of the time," he adds.

The online gambling firm has a large security team that carries out penetration tests, investigates security incidents and ensures system updates are implemented securely.

The in-house always wins

Davies doesn't see Bet365 moving to a hybrid cloud environment in the foreseeable future - once again because of the nature of the business.

"It means that we prefer to manage everything ourselves; if we outsource something we will lose control over it. I know that at this moment, if I have a problem, then the people who are going to solve it are those that I work with, and I know the quality of response I will get from them," he says.

"If I outsource any part of what we do, whether it be management of networks or a third-party cloud provider, I'm reliant upon them meeting their own service level agreements (SLAs) even when things go wrong, and the SLAs you get with most cloud providers are not really worth much, so we've chosen to avoid it - it would be more expensive to do it anyway so there is no real reason for us to go that way," Davies states.

Bet365 does use cloud technology, but mainly for testing and development purposes.

"Because we're always running many projects in parallel, we have to have separate tests and separate development systems running and that's where this type of technology works for you," says Davies.

Of the 550 people working in the IT department, nearly half work on software development, and Davies suggests that there could be up to 3,000 software and infrastructure changes a month.

Hoping for higher odds

Davies says that the company's location in Stoke-on-Trent means it often struggles to attract the right talent so it is preparing to launch a remote working programme that he hopes will attract more people to the company.

The company also has a number of graduate schemes that have sometimes helped to fill skills gaps in the IT department.

"Taking graduates on has worked well for us in some areas - not all - but you do get people who are bright and very enthusiastic and when they're young they have the ability to adapt very quickly as well," Davies explains.

But when it comes to finding staff to work on very complex, distributed systems, finding the right people can be hard, which is a real issue for Davies as these systems are key to Bet365's future success.

"We've been running [distributed analytics platform] Kognitio for at least four years now and it has been very successful for us. For non-financial analytics we also have a Hadoop system in place, which we primarily use to see how people are using the website," Davies explains.

"We have mathematical models that drive a large proportion of change that goes on within our sites and we use analytics to see whether those models are performing correctly. So for example, we can see whether within the sports market, we are not performing as well as we should be," he adds.

On the backend, the firm recently deployed US developer Basho's Riak NoSQL solution ahead of nine other rival solutions. As the firm has grown dramatically since it was founded back in 2001, there was an increasing strain on its systems and it needed an alternative technology in order to scale up.

Bet365 eventually picked a distributed database that Davies declined to name, but the implementation did not go as planned. It then needed another product, and Riak came out on top of the products the firm tested.

"It performed the best by being the most stable and reliable. It wasn't the fastest but it was fast enough and we could scale it fairly linearly," says Davies.