The gambling industry never sleeps. With online casinos, sports betting and digital gaming platforms available 24/7, gambling is accessible at anytime, anywhere in the world. In this always-on, hyperconnected environment, CIOs must confront two equally important concepts: data protection and cyber resilience.
As operators increasingly rely on data to power real-time odds engines, personalised marketing, fraud detection and player analytics, the underlying IT infrastructure becomes more complex. In addition to the demands of hybrid workforces, cloud-native betting platforms, legacy systems, and edge technologies like in-venue gaming kiosks, the challenge increases.
At the same time, a surge in sophisticated cyberattacks, rising cyber insurance premiums, pressure to reduce operational costs, and the industry’s need for continuous uptime make strong, scalable defences and rapid recovery strategies essential.
For UK gambling operators, the question is no longer whether they should prioritise data protection or cyber resilience but rather how to integrate both effectively and sustainably.
The Modern Challenge: More Data, More Points of Failure
For gambling operators, IT systems span on-premises data centres, hyperscale cloud platforms, mobile endpoints, and edge devices. Each of these points presents its own set of risks and recovery complexities.
Add to this the vast amounts of personal and financial data being handled across online betting platforms, casinos and mobile apps and the stakes grow higher. This makes them prime targets for increasingly advanced cyber threats like ransomware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and credential theft. Breaches not only disrupt services but can lead to significant regulatory penalties and reputational damage.
Disaster Recovery is Not Enough
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) approaches designed for catastrophic events and natural disasters are still necessary today, but gambling operations must implement a more security-event-oriented approach on top of that.
Legacy approaches to disaster recovery are insufficient in an environment that is rife with cyberthreats, as these approaches focus on infrastructure, neglecting application-level dependencies and validation processes. Further, threat actors have moved beyond interrupting services and now target data to poison, encrypt or exfiltrate it.
As such, cyber resilience needs more than a focus on recovery. It requires the ability to recover with data integrity intact and prevent the same vulnerabilities that caused the incident in the first place.
What Cyber Resilience Looks Like
Cyber resilience requires a proactive approach based on the assumption that breaches will occur. It also demands a shift in strategies, paying particular attention to:
- Event-Triggered Recovery
Recovery should not wait for human interventions or decision-making. Modern environments must integrate with intrusion detection systems (IDS), security information and management (SIEM) tools, and behavioural analytics to identify anomalies and initiate recovery processes when anomalies in data are detected. This necessitates a more stringent recovery process to ensure data cleanliness; this is important if it affects customer or employee data.
- Runbooks Over Failover Plans
Failover plans, which are common in disaster recovery, focus on restarting Virtual Machines (VMs) sequentially but lack comprehensive validation. Application-centric recovery runbooks, however, provide a step-by-step approach to help teams manage and operate technology infrastructure, applications and services. This is key to validating whether each service, dataset and dependency works correctly in a staged and sequenced approach. This is essential as businesses typically rely on numerous critical applications, requiring a more detailed and validated recovery process.
- Isolated Clean Rooms for Recovery
Recovering in production environments can be risky. However, having isolated “clean room” environments enables organisations to restore systems and validate their integrity without the threat of malware, compromised code, or other vulnerabilities. This process ensures that systems are secure before they are reintroduced into the on-premises environment or other appropriate locations.
- Recovery Prioritisation by Business Impact
Not all data and applications across an organisation are equal. Systems crucial for customer engagement or revenue generation, such as e-commerce platforms or engineering CAD systems, for example, may require near-instant failover capabilities to ensure operations are uninterrupted, even in the event of unexpected failures. Less critical workloads, however, may withstand several hours of downtime. Thus, it is important to define recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) based on the specific needs of each system across the company.
Testing: The Vital Missing Link Between Planning and Execution
These strategies, however, are meaningless without regular testing. Yet many CIOs consider it a checkbox compliance exercise, overlooking the importance of this final step in the process.
Regular testing provides the best defence against human error, assumptions and silent system drift.
To maximise the benefit of a cyber resilience strategy, gambling operators should conduct tests for frequently updated systems every month. Scenario-based tabletop exercises should take place quarterly, and full failovers in clean room environments should occur annually to assess real-world preparedness.
Edge Devices and Endpoint Recovery: Don’t Ignore the Frontlines
The shift to hybrid work has extended the threat surface as mobile devices, remote workstations and IoT devices, for example, often hold sensitive or mission-critical data which is not monitored or secured due to their distributed or decentralised nature which makes it challenging, particularly when located in remote areas. Further, these devices may receive fewer software updates, leaving vulnerabilities open to exploitation. These factors make them an attractive target for threat actors.
Security teams cannot afford to overlook these points and must implement data security strategies that scale to the edge, tailoring Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) based on user roles and data sensitivity to ensure that critical data is prioritised for recovery, and thereby minimising the impact on operations and maintaining cyber resiliency.
Cyber Resilience: Preparing For “When,” Not “If”
Cyber resilience is now essential. With ransomware that can encrypt systems in minutes, the ability to recover quickly and effectively is a business imperative. Therefore, companies must develop an adaptive, layered strategy that evolves with emerging threats and aligns with their unique environment, infrastructure and risk tolerance.
To effectively prepare for the next threat, CIOs and technology leaders must balance technical sophistication with operational discipline, as the best defence isn’t a hardened perimeter, it’s a recovery plan that works. Today, gambling operations cannot afford to choose between data protection and cyber resilience. They must master both, integrating cybersecurity, risk management and digital resilience to safeguard profits, players and platforms.
