Game On! Baazi Games Builds Enhanced Cyber Defenses with AWS Security Services

Launched in 2014, Baazi Games, one of India’s leading technology gaming company specializing in skill-based real money games, provides a secure and trusted platform for over 10 million users to play a range of premium gaming experiences from poker to fantasy sports and rummy.

In 2020, the online gaming sector saw a rise in cyberattacks. Baazi Games experienced a spike in malware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted its servers, services, or networks. With these DDoS attacks occurring almost monthly and lasting for hours, user connectivity and the gaming experience were adversely affected.

To protect its online business, Baazi Games turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bolster its security defense and make its IT infrastructure more resilient.

From July to December 2020, Baazi Games worked with AWS to strengthen its serverless cloud architecture security without needing to invest in additional security personnel or expertise. Baazi Games kept its startup business model lean and cost-efficient, and achieved growth of 70 percent compound annual growth rate.

Baazi Games was able to repel more than 50 DDoS incidents from July 2020 to March 2021, including major attacks coming from about 7000 different IP addresses that simultaneously targeted different applications on its gaming platform, website, and APIs. The company successfully ensured business continuity even while defending against attacks that lasted up to a day.

Avneet Rana, co-founder and chief technology officer at Baazi Games, explains that the company enjoys comprehensive protection from infrastructure attacks with AWS Shield Advanced, a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards applications running on the AWS Cloud with round-the-clock support from the AWS DDoS Response Team.

Rana says, “There was an urgent need to revamp our IT infrastructure. We chose AWS Shield Advanced because it was quick to implement and came with always-on detection, real-time visibility, and mitigation against sophisticated DDoS attacks. We saw immediate results by preventing attacks at the door, and have seen a steady decrease in DDoS activities since. AWS Shield Advanced has also protected us against DDoS-related spikes in our server-compute charges, which almost doubled our usual costs before implementation.”

Baazi Games further strengthened its security perimeters by integrating Amazon Shield Advanced with AWS WAF to help protect its applications and APIs, and Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that monitors malicious activity and unauthorized behavior.

Siddharth Vijay, engineering manager at Baazi Games, shares that the company has also modernized its infrastructure with serverless and event-driven architecture, all built on the AWS Cloud to boost its internal resilience to cyberattacks.

Vijay explains, “We’ve moved 75 percent of our workloads behind Amazon CloudFront, a fast and highly secure content delivery network. Taking a microservices approach has given us better protection from third-party vulnerabilities at both network and application levels, and we’re currently working on segregating and relocating our remaining infrastructure to a cloud-optimized environment.”

Baazi Games has also improved its operational resilience and reduced operating costs by around 30 percent since migrating its API development to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed service to scale containerized applications, and Amazon Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers.  

Without worrying about remediating constant DDoS attacks, Baazi Games can now focus on its goal to be the market leader for online real-money games, especially poker.

Baazi Games is currently looking into infrastructure as code. The company plans to improve its existing disaster recovery processes and deploy these to a different region with a click of a button, minimizing user and traffic downtime even during protracted DDoS attacks. It is also developing streaming capabilities and event bridges to build event-driven applications at scale, and new product features powered by machine learning that display real-time game statistics to give players a better gaming experience.

Looking ahead, Baazi Games hopes to expand into international markets. “With our highly secure gaming platform as a key value proposition, we’re exploring business opportunities to share our knowledge and resources with other companies looking to enter the online gaming market,” says Rana.  

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/gametech/.