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An Olympic task for IT

Sponsorship | Sport | Technology

Atos, worldwide IT partner for London 2012, together with other technology suppliers such as Cisco will be hoping that pride does not come before the fall following a comment by Gerry Pennell, CIO at the London Organising Committee. While only reported in technology media, he suggested that cybercriminals would find it very hard to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the London 2012 Olympic Games website.

Given that IT people in general and security specialists in particular are typically both sceptical and paranoid, such publically voiced confidence is unusual but hopefully not misplaced. The logic is clear in his more detailed explanation, that "the advantage is we are mostly about pushing data out. We can use a content distribution network, so it is very hard to launch a DDoS on us, because our front end is so dispersed." However cyber security experts are the mice in a cut-and-thrust game of cat and mouse, with some very clever cats out there. From a PR perspective would the comment not have been better saved until after the games?

The London 2012 IT infrastructure has been designed, built and will be operated by Atos and from the start security has always been high on the agenda. Now towards the end of 2011 the team is well into the test phase, with two significant stress tests planned for the first half of 2012. With 900 servers, over 1000 security devices and 9,500 computers the team will handle an estimated 30% increase in the network traffic from Beijing. Feeding content to an estimated 8.5 billion devices over the internet by 2012, they will also deliver a new Commentator Information System (CIS) that gives the 27,000 media broadcasters’ real time results via touch screen technology for all 26 Olympic sports and 5 of the Paralympic sports.

It is a very significant project that highlights the growing importance of technology in top class sport. Despite earlier some problems with the ticketing systems, we all hope and expect that the systems will run according to plan and that Gerry is right to be confident!

For another perspective on the London 2012 communications infrastructure, see our latest expert column at iSportconnect at www.isportconnect.com.

 

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