The Technology Operations centre, which will monitor security, power, telecommunications and the results systems that will send Olympic data to fans and the media during the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, was officially opened Monday.
Paul Deighton, chief executive of London 2012 said, “security is a big concern of the Games and cyber security is a major part of that. We are obviously very attentive of the risks involved.
“The key steps we’ve taken to protect these systems are really to make sure we have an independent Olympic-dedicated network which gives us an insulation from the rest of the world that makes it much harder to penetrate”.
This year a 450-member team of experts working out of the centre has been using the technology for a series of Olympic test events. Deighton said, “it went very well. It was a good way to break in the kind of coordination and monitoring we’ll need.
“All the testing we’ve put in place on technology ahead of the Games – that’s one of the prime purposes of these test events – gives me a lot of confidence that the technology would be capable of withstanding any problems”.
He added, “every part of the system has a contingency arrangement. Many of the tests we have exercised on have worked on the basis that, if we do that instead of that, how do we recover and how does the show go on?”
