Olympic security: How Atos will ensure that technology systems are protected

FOR THOSE athletes that win gold medals at the Olympics, the success will bring worldwide acclaim, global press coverage, and no doubt huge marketing and sponsorship deals for the rest of the year.

However, for many of those running the games they will count their success at the Games by how little coverage, headlines and awareness they generate and how quietly and efficiently they go about their work without incident.

The issue of security is one such area. While much of the physical security will be overt and visible - from security guards in hi-viz jackets to police sniffer dogs - those working to ensure the security of the technology in use will be hoping to remain under the radar.

Ensuring the security of the games from a technological point of view is vital, especially when one considers the increase in the types of online threats that now exist compared to previous Olympic events in Vancouver in 2010 or Beijing in 2008.

Threats have evolved to include rogue states looking to make a political point while the eyes of the world are focused on London and online collectives like Anonymous hoping to disrupt the games for reasons possibly too nebulous to comprehend.

However, whoever the perpetrators and whatever their aims, the firms behind the games, led by worldwide IT partner to the Olympics Games, Atos, know it's their job to ensure that such attacks don't succeed and the events run like clockwork.

Atos is working hard to ensure that the systems in place, like those in Vancouver and Beijing, run smoothly and that the headlines are those generated by the athletes, not the infrastructure.

"Technology should be invisible at the Olympic Games because that means everything is working well," Michele Hyron, chief integrator for London 2012 at Atos explained to The INQUIRER.

"For every Games since 2002, Atos business technologists have been continually innovating security infrastructure and London 2012 will be no different."

Without going into specifics for obvious reasons of security, Hyron explained that Atos is using some of the latest systems on the market to help it provide this invisible protection.

"We will be implementing the latest security monitoring solutions to filter, aggregate and prioritise potential IT events, so the team is immediately notified and can react quickly to any unusual or unexpected activity," she said.