The Olympics occur every four years, alternating between the Summer and Winter Games, and presenting each host city or country with only one opportunity to get it right.
In 2024, all eyes are on Paris, as athletes compete in their respective sporting events for a chance at a gold medal. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, organisations like Solidéo (Société de Livraison des Ouvrages Olympiques) have been established to deliver the necessary infrastructure for this year’s competitions.
Frontier Enterprise sat down with Marc Duong, former CISO and CIO of Solidéo, and Pratyush Khare, Area Vice President, Systems Engineering, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Pure Storage, to explore their tech partnership for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
One goal
Solidéo was created for specifically one agenda: to finance, supervise, and deliver the Olympic facilities, including the development and redevelopment work required to host the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
As CISO and CIO of the public sector organisation, Duong had two important objectives:
- Keep construction data secure to ensure building safety and quality.
- Meet the sustainability targets of the Olympic Games committee by choosing the right technology.
“As Solidéo built computer models of its construction projects, it generated a lot of extremely sensitive data. Protecting this data is a major human responsibility because the slightest modification can jeopardise the compliance of these structures with safety regulations and endanger the lives of future users,” Duong said.
To keep the data safe, the organisation needed a scalable solution that could protect against ransomware. Following a public tender, Solidéo decided to partner with Pure Storage.
“Pure Storage knows better than anyone else how to integrate new technologies into its storage solutions while maintaining simplicity, which perfectly suited our small IT team of three people. In addition, the hardware is technically superior to that of other vendors and aligns with our commitment to environmental sustainability,” Duong explained.
Urban transformation
All in all, Solidéo has completed nearly 70 major infrastructural projects across France, dedicated to hosting the Olympics.
The design of these projects anticipated a post-carbon city, “favourable to biodiversity and resilient to extreme climate events,” the organisation said on its website. After the Olympics, the constructed and reconstructed structures will be repurposed as public amenities, housing units, and offices.
Some of the completed projects include the shared base for the Police Prefecture and the Paris Fire Brigade (BSPP) in Saint-Denis, the Marie Paradis Gymnasium and Bourget Sports Park in Le Bourget, the Pablo Neruda Gymnasium in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, and public spaces and facilities in the Athletes’ Village and Media Village.
To achieve these, Solidéo innovated in pioneering construction methods, technical solutions resulting from research, new materials, new legal frameworks, and collective intelligence.
One significant aspect of their technological advancement was the integration of Pure Storage solutions. According to Duong, it took only four days to install the Pure FlashArray, conduct testing, and train their users.
“Thanks to Pure’s storage capacities, we were able to multiply our data volume by 7,700 times and thus support the exponential growth of data from our building information modelling (BIM) imagery,” he revealed.
Meanwhile, Pure Evergreen Storage allowed Solidéo to upgrade its storage capacity without disruption or changing hardware.
Securing storage
In response to evolving cyberthreats, Pure has introduced new features to enhance its existing cyber resiliency solutions. These new capabilities include:
- Improved cyber recovery and resilience service level agreement (SLA), extending beyond the original ransomware recovery SLA to cover disaster recovery scenarios and customised recovery plans.
- AI-driven anomaly detection, which helps organisations identify threats and anomalies, such as ransomware attacks, and determine the most recent clean snapshot to minimise operational impact through quick identification of recovery points.
According to Pure Storage’s Pratyush Khare, large-scale events like the Olympics are prime targets of cyberattacks due to their high visibility and vast amount of sensitive data.
“They attract significant attention from hackers looking to disrupt operations, steal personal information, or compromise security systems, making robust cybersecurity measures essential,” he said.
For his part, Duong was thankful that they experienced no issues with their data management during the Paris Olympics.
“With Pure, we had the best possible conditions to deliver the Olympic Games venues on time, thanks to the performance of its storage and data protection capabilities. Pure adapted very easily to our needs for rapid scalability,” Duong concluded.
