Rio Olympic Games pioneers cloud use

On-premise hosting will soon be a thing of the past in the Olympic Games as key systems supporting the Rio competitions next year will be hosted in the cloud.

Core portals supporting key aspects of the Games such as volunteer activities and credential management will be hosted in a private cloud environment provided by telecommunications firm Embratel.

According to the IT systems integrator for the Games, Atos, using the hosting model for these key systems is part of a move towards an entirely cloud-based model for all applications by the time the next competition takes place in 2020.

"The Rio Games are a transition to the next Games, which will be entirely hosted in the cloud," Rio 2016 Olympic Games operations manager at Atos, Marcelo Grimaldi, told portal Convergência Digital.

Earlier this year, the Rio Olympic Committee hired Microsoft to create and maintain the three main websites for the Games - the Torch Relay in addition to the two websites that will broadcast the results of the Olympic and Paralympic competitions - which will be hosted on cloud computing platform Azure.

The IT structure required to stage the Rio Games will include about 80 different systems and applications, which will be accessed from about 12,000 computers and 3,800 printing devices. About 500 servers will also be deployed for the event.