Data in the Fast Lane

JuiceIT Sponsored Blog

Formula One races are no longer won on the track. They’re won in the garage, by a virtual army of analytics experts who crunch every bit of data imaginable. In a sport where a split-second difference determines a team’s finish in a race, there’s no room for errors at any part of the journey.

Life for a racing team is literally on the road – Williams Martini Racing teams travel with their pop-up data centres to competitions in 21 countries on six continents within a year. So, when the Williams team arrives at a new Formula One circuit, their engineers haul with them the team’s most important piece of equipment, a two-rack data centre that they erect for the duration of the race.

These “pop-up” data centres host the engineering systems and analytics that process real-time data streams from the cars’ onboard sensors to deliver the final fraction of horsepower, tire life, and speed. So, these systems must function securely and flawlessly in crunch situations.

In addition, as Williams has gone more digital and mobile, more endpoints mean more potential points of entry to defend. Unpatched vulnerabilities can expose applications and data to unauthorised access and theft. DDoS attacks can overwhelm key systems, rendering them unresponsive. Botnet infestations can siphon off compute cycles and degrade service quality.

For Williams data to make a difference, it must be kept secure or risk losing its value entirely. Keeping all the race data completely confidential while also being 100% available for breakneck speed decision-making is a challenge. Part of that challenge includes maintaining the availability of a full complement of data centre services in real-time conditions where 100 percent uptime is an absolute necessity.

Through its partnership with Symantec, Williams embraced a new portfolio of technologies and services to eradicate threat vulnerabilities; to create robust, intelligent, and secure workflows; to enable more innovative, more reliable, and faster work practices without risk; and to robustly protect the group’s high-value data and intellectual property (IP).

Join Symantec at Data^#3’s JuiceIT to hear how we enable Williams Martini to outrace threats at 300 km/h.