Securing the Games

Securing the games in Athens will cost over $1 billion, with just a third of that going to the IT security of the games. When you think about it, that's a tremendous amount of money being plopped down for a few weeks of competition -- but that's the kind of world we live in. There will be 10,500 workstations or servers on the Olympic network, which will not be connected to the internet -- located in 62 venues, supporting over 200,000 users and supported by 3,500 personnel -- 400 of them being IT security staff. That may seem as overkill, but when you think of the public exposure, and the target the games represent for not just cyber terrorists, but kids with their own special brand of attention deficit disorder, then it seems like nothing. Managing such an effort must be an amazing experience -- it's like an Olympic event in itself -- pretty much creating a company's infrastructure from scratch, and having it survive a few weeks of live test -- and if everything goes well, no one will ever know you were there.