The following is the full transcript of Nutanix's The Forecast Q&A with Edgegap's founder & CEO of Edgegap. Read The Forecast's article here.

• Q: What are some of the biggest threats to live game environments today versus in the past? Are the threats evolving, and do you have to think differently now?

Online multiplayer games with live environments used to face relatively predictable threats from both server-side and client-side. Such as straightforward DDoS floods, the occasional server overload, or  simple aimbots.

Since then, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Edgegap supports hundreds of games with millions of players, and we see (and fell) that shift every day.

Modern attacks are no longer coming from a small handful of hostile IPs; they’re emerging from globally distributed botnets built on cloud VMs, residential-proxy networks, and even hijacked IoT fleets, which makes traditional mitigation far less effective.

Cheating also has evolved from hobbyist tools into commercialized, AI-powered services that adapt to countermeasures (even, sometimes, in real-time).

This is pushing studios to consider their player experience to a level never seen before. Game development planification such as game design has had to change given the types of threads, where live-ops events, ranked ladders, cross-play, and community-hosted servers all expand the number of possible areas that can be attacked.

The consequence is that reliability and security can’t be bolted on after launching games anymore; orchestration, matchmaking, and network placement have to assume constant churn, unpredictable traffic spikes, and adversaries who can scale as fast as the game does.

This is exactly why Edgegap invests so heavily in dynamic deployments, multi-cloud and edge diversity, and automated traffic steering: the threats are evolving quickly, so the way we protect and deliver live games must evolve even faster. With the large number of games deployed daily, game studios rarely have a second chance to seduce players; and as we’ve seen so many times in the past, it’s always the studios’ faults when something bad happens.

Thus, game studios need solutions like Edgegap to be able to help them against such threads and deliver an end-user experience that can compete against established products with massive, well experienced teams.

• Q: Do you find that DDoS attacks are becoming more prevalent, sophisticated, or harder to detect? What are the challenges there, and what kinds of solutions are used to mitigate them?

DDoS attacks have unquestionably become more frequent, more sophisticated, and far harder to detect, and at Edgegap we see that shift firsthand across the live games we protect.

These aren’t the old-school volumetric floods you could block with a simple filter; today’s attacks come from globally distributed botnets running on cloud VMs, residential proxies, and compromised IoT devices, constantly shapeshifting to mimic legitimate player traffic.

That evolution makes static defenses almost useless, which is why automation and distributed orchestration have become essential. Our on-demand architecture, deploying and redeploying game servers across hundreds of edge locations, lets us absorb, reroute, or sidestep attacks in real time, effectively turning the attack surface into a moving target.

By combining automated detection, instant region failover, multi-cloud diversity, and network-level filtering before malicious packets ever reach a game server, we turn what used to mean guaranteed downtime into a transient blip and reduce drastically the “blast radius”.

In this new environment, the best defense isn’t a bigger wall but a living, elastic, distributed infrastructure, exactly the kind of resilience we’ve built at Edgegap.

• Q: Is protecting player privacy important in a game environment? What types of user data are at risk of being exposed in an online game? And how do you prevent breeches from happening?

Protecting player privacy is absolutely critical in modern game environments because the data at risk goes far beyond usernames, it includes IP addresses, real-time location, device fingerprints, account identifiers, and sometimes even metadata that can be stitched together to profile a player.

There are two main types of game server infrastructure with online games. Player-hosted game server, which uses peer-to-peer networking (“P2P”) to transfer data, and dedicated game servers which are hosted on the cloud.

Peer-to-peer architectures and relay systems make this even more dangerous: as we’ve shown at Edgegap, P2P traffic can often be decoded with off-the-shelf tools like Fiddler, exposing player information to anyone on the session, and cheaters routinely exploit P2P or relay-hosted matches to man-in-the-middle traffic, inject packets, or harvest data from other players. Not only does this threaten your players privacy, but it has a direct impact on the studios revenue by allowing players to steal your paid assets. And that’s just security, there’s also the issue of cheaters in P2P games.

Centralized servers help, but they aren’t enough unless the environment is fully isolated, containerized, monitored, and deployed on infrastructure that treats every session as its own sandbox.

Our approach at Edgegap focuses exactly on that: removing the need for P2P relays altogether, placing secure game servers close to players, rotating instances constantly, and keeping all sensitive communication inside encrypted, server-authoritative environments.

When your infrastructure eliminates direct player-to-player exposure, you remove an entire category of privacy breaches before they can even happen, which is a key aspect the online game industry increasingly realizes is essential for both safety and competitive integrity.

• Q: I’ve been reading about anti-cheat and the length some players will go to to win. How you do you stop botters and cheaters from getting in? And if they do get in, what measures are in place to detect and eject them? Are they becoming harder to block and detect?

Cheaters and botters have become far more sophisticated and stopping them now requires a combination of solid game architecture, smart infrastructure, and specialized anti-cheat partners.

At Edgegap, we see firsthand how critical server-authoritative design is, when the server, not the client, decides what’s real, most cheats lose their teeth before they even reach gameplay.

But that’s only the foundation: modern cheats use machine-learning aim assist, packet manipulation, and even kernel-level exploits, which is why we work closely with key partners like Mirror Networking’s Guard & Epic Online Service’s Easy AntiCheat offering source-code–level anti-cheat solutions, allowing detection hooks deep inside the engine itself.

And if cheaters do slip through, a distributed, automated backend helps by analyzing abnormal patterns, latency anomalies, movement impossibilities, packet tampering, and lets studios eject or quarantine suspicious players without impacting everyone else.

The reality is that cheaters are getting harder to block because cheat developers iterate as fast as game developers do, but combining authoritative servers, intelligent orchestration, and deep anti-cheat integration creates a multi-layered defense strong enough to keep the playing field fair even as the threat evolves.

One strategy we see being adopted by studios is to tag cheaters, and force them to play against each other, leaving a playingfield of non-cheaters players have fun together.

• Q: Is AI playing a part in the protection against new threats? Conversely, are you seeing AI being used as a weapon against your defenses?

AI is now woven into both sides of the security battle, and at Edgegap we feel that duality every day.

On the defensive side, we use machine learning across our orchestration layer to detect anomalies, steer traffic intelligently, and make real-time decisions about where and how game servers should be deployed; that decision engine is strong enough that we patented our approach early on because automation and prediction are now essential to resilience.

But AI is also empowering attackers: cheat developers use AI to generate adaptive aimbots and behavioral spoofing, while botnets leverage AI to mimic legitimate player traffic more convincingly, making old-school filters far less effective.

The result is an arms race where AI isn’t optional anymore, it's the only way to keep pace with adversaries who can iterate in seconds. The upside is that, with a globally distributed infrastructure and automated decision systems, AI becomes a force multiplier on defense, letting us react faster and with more precision than any manual system ever could.

• Q: *I see you have to defend quite a robust multicloud infrastructure. How do you go about monitoring and responding to threats across such a vast network? Could you talk a bit about how your protections operate across edge and cloud services and private data center?

Defending a large multicloud and edge infrastructure means you can’t treat servers like fragile “pets” anymore, you need a fully stateless, cattle-style architecture where nothing is precious, and everything can be replaced instantly.

At Edgegap, that philosophy is core to our security model: instead of trying to heal compromised or degraded resources, we simply terminate them and respawn fresh instances elsewhere across our network of cloud, edge, and private datacenter partners.

This makes threat response both faster and safer, because an attack on one region or provider never becomes a single point of failure. Our monitoring continuously analyzes health, latency, traffic anomalies, and security signals across hundreds of locations, and our orchestration engine uses that data to reroute sessions, redeploy servers, or isolate suspicious areas in real time.

The result is a kind of self-healing ecosystem: distributed, stateless, resilient by design, and capable of shifting its weight instantly to wherever conditions are safest and fastest.