I quickly discovered that working on Olympic IT is a logistical, administrative and diplomatic challenge unlike anything I’d ever known. Our direct clients are the IOC and the host city’s organizing committee. But we also have to work with broadcasters, telcos, the press and various technology partners. This vast number of stakeholders requires us to navigate the cultures and the bureaucracies of the host city and country and dozens of corporate entities of every shape and size.
Working on Olympic IT is a logistical, administrative and diplomatic challenge unlike anything else.
When I look back at my time working on the Olympic and Paralympic Games, I can safely say that everything has changed. Between Salt Lake City 2002 and Rio 2016, we built and decommissioned physical data centers at every site. We brought in, cabled and tested physical hardware. We assembled core teams comprising 10-20 Atos Olympic Games veterans and then local teams in each host city to build the infrastructure and run a dedicated Integration Testing Lab (ITL).
The process was cumbersome to manage, and the hardware requirements kept growing as we needed to push more data through the pipelines. We also had to boost our security posture due to a spike in cyberthreats. We dealt with 80 million IT security events at Athens 2004, 570 million at Rio 2016 and 4.4 billion at Tokyo 2020. There were environmental concerns, too. Powering physical infrastructure required massive amounts of electricity, and sustainability was a growing concern.
To address these many issues, we moved some of our infrastructure for London 2012 to the cloud. We migrated the management systems, including the sports entries and qualification system, the workforce management system, and the accreditation system. However, London’s real-time systems continued to be hosted at hardwired on-prem data centers.
Over the next several years, we continued to move more systems to the cloud. When we started planning for Tokyo 2020, we decided to go with a 100% cloud-based approach, which meant rethinking every aspect of our IT deployment strategy.
This content was originally published here.
Categories: digital transformation