West Ham FC hits the back of the net on cybersecurity

A new partnership with Acronis is cutting out shadow IT and enabling a cohesive experience across systems

Football and cybersecurity are not natural partners, on the face of it. After all, what does kicking a ball around a pitch have to do with protecting data?

As it turns out - speaking to West Ham United FC's network & security manager Lee Cummings - the two are more closely linked than you might expect.

West Ham has between 400 and 500 staff working behind the scenes, across a mix of on-site and hybrid locations. Part of that is due to the pandemic, and part to the nature of football: at points the stadium is closed for other events, forcing staff to relocate.

A set-up like that makes it easy for shadow IT to creep in, which is exactly what Cummings found when he joined the Club last year.

"What I noticed when I first joined West Ham was that we seemed to be using different transfer software or services to share things outside the company. I prefer one platform, especially where you can monitor things granularly, so you can see everything going through the same platform - there's no worrying about where data has gone and how it's been distributed and what services are being used.

"To be honest, although there are companies out there - WeTransfer, Dropbox, etc. - that are trusted, not knowing where all the data is and if some remnants of that data are kept somewhere is concerning."

When you consider that the data West Ham collects can be highly sensitive - player performance analytics, sponsor relationships, and of course personal information about fans - it is no surprise that knowing its location is important.

"Sports may be the main focus of the business, but that data is also extremely important to us as well...We have multiple different streams of data and trying to control and manage that, and having that on a platform that's easily accessible and has the security in place, is very, very key. No mistakes can be made, no people that aren't supposed to have access to it can get access to that data. It's a major thing for us, I can't emphasise it enough."

West Ham signed a new partnership with Acronis this year for Cyber Protect, which integrates all protection into a single console. This turned out to be a killer app for the club.

"We really liked the ability to have one platform for everything. In IT you have multiple platforms, you've got to be familiarising yourself with how it works if you haven't used them for a long time... so it was one of the driving factors: a nice platform, familiar to everybody, that we could just continue using...

"We were very, very keen on building up a relationship with Acronis because, as I said, it's all on one platform. I can have my files sync and share, and it looks the same; I can have my backup, it looks the same; I can have my cybersecurity, and it's all the same. It's all the same platform, all the same dashboard, you can kind of go mad and do what you need to do."

West Ham plans to expand the partnership when its existing cybersecurity contract is up for renewal - taking on additional functionality in CyberProtect and new tools like File Sync & Share.

If football and security are natural partners, it appears the same goes for West Ham and Acronis.