This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. > Find out more here

 

UEFA heads to the cloud ahead of Euro 2012

By Gareth Morgan

27 Sep 2011

View Comments
football-stadium-corner-flag

European football’s governing body has now completed the transition of its IT infrastructure to a cloud-based service, ahead of its showpiece European championship next summer.

UEFA signed a three-year hosting deal with cloud services provider Interoute Communications towards the end of 2010. It finished moving its IT infrastructure to Interoute in the summer.

Further reading

“Obviously, there’s a slight risk for us, moving to a new provider only a year before Euro 2012,” said Daniel Marion, head of information and communications technology at UEFA.

But those risks are massively outweighed by the business benefits of moving the event-driven organisation to a cloud service provider, when it comes to dealing with intense peaks in demand for IT.

“UEFA is here to deliver football [competitions] not build datacentres,” Marion told Computing.

Under its cloud services deal, Interoute will host all of the infrastructure needed to deliver UEFA’s IT services. That infrastructure will be hosted on dedicated hardware, but UEFA does not own any of the hardware, nor control what server or storage platforms are used.

UEFA runs many of the applications one might expect to find in any large organisation, such as SAP financial systems, HR systems and email. It also runs a number of more unusual systems, including systems to deal with ticketing, broadcast and media rights, photographer accreditation and anti-doping monitoring systems. Its web site activities include online video and mobile apps.

“The big challenge for us is that we don’t get a second chance. If we miss a big match, that’s it,” said Marion.

The Euro 2012 football championship will inevitably be a time of peak demand for UEFA’s IT team, but it can expect many frenetic days before it kicks off.

“For Euro 2012, there will be two matches on a day at the most. With the Champions’ League group stages, we have eight matches on at the same time,” said Marion.

Reader comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

Does Google know too much about you?

Google's linked data policy, which came into effect on March 1, allows the company to collect information about its users across all its products, services and websites and store it in one place. This has been criticised by organisations ranging from CNIL to Microsoft, all of whom have expressed concerns that it's difficult to tell which data Google collects and how it's used. Now the Information Commissioner's Office is investigating whether Google's privacy policy is compliant with UK law. Are you worried that Google knows too much about you?

41 %

5 %

15 %

39 %