Monday, September 1, 2008

The role of IT in Olympics


The Olympics finished and now we can see the large numbers processed by IT services. The Information Week published, during the Olympics, a blog about what was happening in IT services. In a post called New Records For IT, Bob Violino wrote about the huge numbers:

- Systems in Beijing securely processed a more than 80% greater volume of data on competition for media and news agencies worldwide, compared with the Olympics in Athens.

- The IT infrastructure in Beijing enabled nearly 50% more stories to be published each day in English by the Olympic News Service, totaling an average of 500 stories each day during the Games.

- Atos Origin added 40% more sports disciplines to its Commentator Information System to provide broadcasters with more detailed, real-time information about more sporting events.

- IT supported about 30% more hits on the intranet for the Beijing Games, called INFO2008, averaging about 1.2 million hits each day.

- Systems collected and filtered more than 12 million information security events each day to protect against potential IT security threats. Of these, fewer than 100 were identified as real issues. All of these were resolved, according to Atos Origin, resulting in no impact on the Olympics.

I think increasingly the great sports events depend on IT services to process and publicize the information, transforming nowadays in a fundamental item.

No comments: