Cloud is critical to competing in the digital economy. Today, your customers search for, discover, interact with, and buy products and services differently. Is your business ready to adapt? Cloud puts you on the path to digital innovation… and extending and deepening your customer relationships. Here's a breakdown of how Cloud gives you speed-to-market, agility, security, availability and resilience.

1. @DiDataSecurity dimensiondata.com/security Dimension Data Security
Go to dimensiondata.com/tourdefrance/casestudy
for more about how we’ve revolutionised the viewing
experience of the Tour de France.
We also provided actionable, real-time information about various aspects of the race,
throughout its duration. For example:
• which geographies had the greatest race followers
• the profiles of the most loyal fans, for example their age bracket
These insights will open up potential sponsorship opportunities for the A.S.O. in new
geographies, and industry sectors.
Cloud: critical to competing
in the digital economy
The race to digitisation is on! And it’s driving dramatic social and economic changes.
Is your business ready to adapt? Cloud puts you on the path to
digital innovation… and extending and deepening your customer relationships.
Today’s marketplace is fast-moving and
hyper-competitive. Taking new products and
services to market needs to happen…
in weeks or months – not years.
Using cloud you can:
• test new ideas quickly
• avoid barriers and bottlenecks
• set up infrastructure and capacity on the fly
• get to market faster
Today, your customers search for,
discover, interact with, and buy
products and services differently.
Their expectations of technology:
immediate
interactive
rich
Here’s how
Cloud gives you:
Speed-to-market
Security
availability and resilience
…and it’s the enabler of
game-changing technologies
security
agility
speed-to-market
How we used cloud to prepare for the Tour de France
in a four-month sprint
To achieve the A.S.O.’s ambition
of revolutionising
the viewing experience
for fans of the Tour de France, we
needed to move quickly.
Traditional approaches wouldn’t do;
instead we used:
• agile development practices
• our global cloud platform to
give us speed
March JulyApril, May, June
3 4 5 6 7
Deal
signed
Go
live
Solution
developed
To be agile your business needs to:
• respond to, and embrace market and day-to-day
operational changes – quickly and easily
• run operations that are:
- flexible and resilient
- easy to adjust or ‘reset’ as things change
1
Forbes, Make Business Agility A Key Corporate Attribute, September 2013
• react quickly to
market changes
• adapt to the
unforeseen or
unexpected
• cut out time and cost
burdens of traditional
infrastructure
Agility
With cloud
you can
Agility in action: Continual enhancements of cycling
fans’ viewing experience throughout the Tour de France
We tested our application in the cloud
before and during the Tour.
As the race progressed, we:
• made several application changes
• tested them
• performed QA
• moved them into production environment
This allowed us to:
• quickly add functionality
• enhance the amount and quality
of the data provided
• further optimise fans’ viewing experience
all in
24-hour
development
‘sprints’
• look for a provider with:
- robust infrastructure and
security certifications
- advanced threat intelligence
and cybersecurity capabilities
• remember that all clouds aren’t
created equal
- does a public, private, or hybrid
solution best fit your needs?
To keep your data safe:
Cloud offers
many benefits,
but is
it secure?
24/7security operations
centres provided monitoring
Secure private cloud; protected network access
We set up a private cloud for the
A.S.O.’s exclusive use, and secured the
network that accessed it.
the cloud-based application
serving the data was
highly secure
24
meanwhile,
our cybersecurity teams
proactively
identified
potential threats and thwarted
1,000s
of attempted
hacks
In the competitive digital economy you need
your systems operating 24/7. You can’t run the
risk of downtime because your internal teams
haven’t accurately predicted the right amount
of capacity.
Running traditional infrastructure leaves you
vulnerable to:
• unforeseen capacity demands
• waste, as a result of overprovisioning
• the risk of human error
Availability and resilience
With cloud
you can:
• manage unpredictable ‘peaks and troughs’
in demand
• leverage autoscaling which:
- eliminates the need to adjust capacity manually
- avoids overprovisioning
- ensures you only pay for what you use
Dealing with data spikes across time zones,
with no capacity restraints
• the amount of data generated
• the number of viewers of the data, at different times
of the day, as cycling fans around the globe logged
on to track the race results
During the three weeks
of the Tour de France
there were spikes in:
• no capital investment
in hardware needed
• solution could be put
into ‘hibernation’
after the race
For the A.S.O., this was
highly efficient… and
cost-effective:
• automatically
monitored demand
• added more capacity
to support the
application
As data volumes and
demand for capacity
increased, our cloud:
of the companies that were on
the Fortune 1000 list 10 years ago
have vanished – many were simply
unable to adapt to change1
.
70%
Enabling
game-changing
technologies
The digital economy is built on the foundation of:
To understand your customers better and build
long-term relationships, you need to gather and
analyse large waves of unstructured data from:
• social media
• online activity
• wearables and transponders
… and then discard it once you’ve gathered the
insights you need.
Cloud is the game-changing platform
that allows you to do so. Because it’s
expandable, cloud allows you to:
• gather unstructured data
• analyse it using analytic apps
• quickly remove it and replace it
with new data
the Internet of Things
big data social media
applications mobility
A digital tour de force
At this year’s Tour de France we delivered a game-changing cloud-based
digital analytics solution for the A.S.O.
198 riders
in 22 teams
generated
42,000
geospatial points
and
75 million
GPS readings
live-tracking
website
built to support
17 million
viewers and
2,000
page requests
per second
rider data processed
in our cloud –
over 60
virtual servers
spread across
3continents
consuming over
350 million
CPU cycles per second