As I write this I have been watching the final between Andy Murray and Roger Federer. Unfortunately, Murray didn’t win, yet nevertheless it is still a new hallmark for British tennis since it shines a bright light on its future.
The Murray / Federer match was played at one of the world’s greatest clubs, which over the years has not baulked at developing and looking for new ways to adapt to change. Obvious examples are the Hawkeye system and the roof on the centre court.
Another example is the club’s use of cloud-based servers via IBM’s CloudSmart.
This is just as well, as apparently during the Wimbledon fortnight hits to the website rocket from the average half a million visits to a staggering 50 million. This, I think, would be unsustainable if they relied on in-house servers.
Reliance on your own servers is no longer sufficient for a major business even those as a famous tennis club. Like any business, it is imperative that new opportunities are grasped, particularly ones that are pre-eminent in their field. No pun intended.
The problem for websites that get huge numbers of hits is that surges in visits (called spikes) put a strain on in-built infrastructure. This doesn’t generally happen with cloud-hosted systems. Outages can occur but they are rare, whereas they can be very common with traditional websites.
Cloud signals a new future for major sporting events provided they are prepared to grasp it. Wimbledon aptly shows the benefits of using cloud.
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