Of Smartphones and Gaming Enterprises

I spent way too much of last weekend cleaning unmentionable crud out of my Smartphone. No, I didn’t drop it in the toilet. In that case, I’d know whom to blame – me – and the lesson would have been clear: Don’t take your Smartphone into the bathroom! Instead, hidden away in its internal storage, I stumbled upon what ended up being hundreds of interspersed text files containing cryptic, offensive messages, most spouting juvenile bigotry of one form or another. It was just plain weird and, worse, pointless. Yuck!

I prefer destructive behavior that makes sense. Not that I encourage destructive behavior – I don’t – but, really, if you’re going to invest precious time and energy in criminal mischief, please have a more rational motive than juvenile giggles. Plus, it’s hard to defend against the inexplicable, and it’s not particularly satisfying, either. It’s why they make movies about casino heists, not about creeps who smuggle cringe-worthy text via phone apps. Casinos are glamorous, attractive targets, and the movie masterminds who target them are … well, movie-mastermind types. In contrast, my Smartphone’s 32 gigs is a storehouse of boring bits – nothing glamorous there – and the malicious creeps who targeted it are just, well, real-world creepy.

Unlike my Smartphone creeps, the motives of casino thieves are straightforward. As Willie Sutton explained when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” Of course, in Willie’s days, they take cash, while today’s financial and gaming industries are high-tech endeavors dealing more in digital transactions and governmental compliance than tangible currency. And their ever-increasing degree of digital sophistication makes securing the digital property of gaming enterprises evermore challenging. When the high-volume traffic of your embedded computing and network systems involves the constant flow of money, you can count on attracting the most cunning and tenacious of adversaries.

Big targets require big solutions, which is why Advantech, already an international leader in secure automation and embedded computing solutions, is now also the world’s leading automation supplier to the gaming industry. Advantech acquired UK-based Innocore Gaming in 2010, creating a new business unit, Advantech-Innocore, with a combined engineering research-and-development team that now exceeds 900 and total staffing of 5000-plus employees worldwide, bringing to market more than 3000 gaming enterprise-specific products, ranging from mini-ITX boards, digital signage, networking and video streaming solutions, to, of course, surveillance and security systems.

Now that my Smartphone’s security defenses have been so embarrassingly compromised – I strongly suspect human error: mine! – I’m still trying to figure out how to prevent repetition of that dispiriting experience short of actually flushing the thing. But, I’ve no doubt of where to go for rock-solid solutions to embedded computing and automation systems. Whether they’re the extreme challenges faced by the gaming industry, or those of the smallest main-street enterprise, Advantech’s got your back.