Cloud Computing and the Olympics

The London Olympics are not using the Cloud. Cloud seems a good match for the Olympics for provisioning a scalable and on demand architecture quickly, and then taking it down after the event. That is precisely what the technology supports. The integration and deployment of the infrastructure for the Olympics is a big program with hundreds of servers due to the various events and related technology needed to support them. This can cause technologists to take a more conservative path to manage risks and stick to utilizing existing technologies.
An event like the Olympics does put a strain on the network bandwidth. To compound this issue, there is heavy use of twitter and test messages. A lot of this was anticipated and hence some media and entertainment organizations that report on the events are using Cloud based conferencing capabilities to share information and utilize the on demand, easy provisioning aspects of the Cloud. Some Cloud providers are providing data and applications during the time when there will be increased demand for bandwidth and to ensure business continuity for organizations. There are many organizations where workers are logging in remotely to avoid the traffic and rush and Cloud supports these aspects. Such remote access applications have been quite popular due to the substantial benefits they offer.

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