8 IT Lessons Learned From the London Olympics

The 2012 London Olympics wasn’t just another Olympics where the sport was dominated by contestants from all over the world. The games saw a new innovative platform, where application, infrastructure and technicalities moved all over the park. IT pros found the 2012 Olympics pretty interesting because of the increase in number of viewers - over 1 billion visitors in its official website, and the enhanced list of technologies being applied. Whatever be the end result, the mega event managed to offer some good and strong lessons to network and security admins all over the world. Suggestions ranged from how to build a good infrastructure, to successfully prevent sudden security breakouts and also to keep company operations run smooth even during massive network let-downs.

With that here is a list that features 8 top notch IT lessons from the 2012 Summer Olympics for technology specialists to improve services in infrastructure, network and data management.

#1 Business intelligence can expose data in new ways:

Business intelligence apps like QlikTech changed the whole projected view of this year’s Olympics. According to Anthony Deighton, the CTO of QlikTech, the company was totally surprised to see the end result of their business intelligence app in the Summer Olympics. QlikTech ran this app over 30 popular athletes, where viewers can predict who might win the gold, silver and bronze in an event. The app uses previously stored statistics, along with visual summaries and other analytics.

#2 Keep an Eye on Networks During Online Broadcasts:

Online broadcasting was another lesson to be learned from this year’s Olympics. With over 53 million views in YouTube alone, double the previous number, the online broadcasting networks took a massive turnover after the mega event. According to Mark Urban, security expert in Blue Coat, a network caching company; every single customer who is watching the Olympics via streaming can consume over 30 percent of company’s T1 line. The direct streaming technique possesses additional costs, mostly because of network and online management.

#3 Social networking can cripple GPS services:

The use of social networking services during an event can surely cripple the GPS services. For example, during a bicycle race at the event, fans kept on tweeting such that the tweets caused disruption of GPS services. These services where to provide the speed and location of the riders to the event officials and managers. Brian Jacobs, senior product manager at Ipswitch Network Management advises that this disruption could have been avoided if the network admins had put up a certain limited and restricted amount of activity to a particular social website.

#4 Stress - test your website with the cloud:

Another effective method implied at the Olympics was the use of Cloud stimulated software. According to the official London 2012 website, the London Organizing committee used stimulation software called SOASTA to test the endurance of their official site. One of the lead architects in SOASTA, Paul Bunnell said that the software ran stimulated tests of over 1 billion people accessing the site from every country across the globe. These analysis helped security admins to get an overall view of the website’s capability.

#5 Plans for Mass Deployments and Training:

This year’s games were all about providing good IT infrastructure to their well wishers. Acer, one of the official security partners, deployed servers, mobile devices and laptops to improve the IT communications within the event. Todd Olson, Acer program manager at the London Olympics said, they had deployed over 400 workers to install, direct and to improve the IT services. Olson also said that, the biggest challenge was to test the capability of these systems after two weeks of its hectic training.

#6 Protect Lost or stolen devices:

Protecting lost or stolen devices from data theft was one of the major concerns at the event. According to a mobile research study conducted by an enterprise security company, Venafi, over 67,000 mobiles and gadgets were supposed to be lost in the two week period. Gregory Webb, a Venafi spokesman exclaimed that it’s pretty impossible for companies to contain and physically protect the mobile. People must be reasonable to defend and encrypt their own data, with password and security code, so that their gadgets won’t be subjected to any data theft.

#7 Avoid potential high profile scams:

One of the latest methods in disrupting an event is the outspreading of fake news and scams. Rather entitled as a truth, at the games officials might get so thrilled that they often forget the security concern and later fall for fake announcements or news. Attacks like tweeting about a criminal running loose across the stadium can cause real havoc throughout. Ondrej Krehel, the information security officer with IDentity Theft 911, advises that security officials must really be bothered and experienced about the new techniques in hacking.

#8 Beef up data center capacity:

Neil Cresswell, managing director for infrastructure management company Savvis, said that one of the major concerns for the company was to ensure that the data center had the capacity to handle the total blitz in two weeks. According to Cresswell, the company added their fourth data center in London, increasing the megawatt capacity to 1.1 megawatt. Along with the data centers, Savvis also deployed many fuel generators, a secondary backup in case of any fuel transportation problem.