Nine months until the Rio Olympics, but the tech race has already started
It might be nine months until the opening of the Olympic Games in Rio next year, but the race to get the tech infrastructure ready is well underway.
The Technology Operations Centre (TOC) for the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games officially opened this week as part of the IT readiness review.
This is the control and command centre for all of the technology behind the 144 Olympic venues: during the games this 800 square-metre centre will monitor and control the systems that deliver the results from competitions to the media.
Technology supplier Atos said Rio 2016 is the first Summer games that will use the cloud for key applications, including the volunteer portal and the accreditation system. It's also the first time that the operations centre in the host city will aided by the new permanent Technical Technology Operations Center (TTOC) in Spain, which will provide support for critical Games IT systems with a team of 150.
This site will then be reused for future games in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs; more systems will be run using software-as-a-service in future games.
Since the start of the test events in July this year, the Rio 2016 TOC has been running with a core team. From 25 July 2016 it will operate at full capacity with 500 staff covering 187 positions in shifts.
It will be staffed by a combined team comprising the Rio 2016 technology team and Atos, which is operating it jointly, and the other technology partners.
Atos said that running the IT for the Olympic Games is equivalent to setting up and running the tech infrastructure for a company of 200,000 employees with four billion customers -- and moving to a new headquarters every two years.