- Almost ten percent believe Olympic chaos is guaranteed
- Information storage ranks as CIO’s biggest headache

UK CIOs are concerned that the upcoming Olympic Games will affect their business, according to a survey conducted by ControlCircle, a leading UK managed services provider.

A recent survey of 100 CIOs/COOs/IT heads identified that 77% respondents are concerned or slightly concerned that the Games will affect their ability to conduct business as usual.

In addition, nearly one in ten of those surveyed said they predict that the Games will inflict likely chaos on their organisation.

“Organisations are likely to have a major issue getting staff to and from data centres in Greater London,” said Carmen Carey, CEO of ControlCircle. “Given our customer base and the position of our data centres we’ve spoken at length to a number of officials to establish levels of support required. Organisations need to ensure they too are in conversation with their service provider to guarantee they have the necessary capacity and logistical arrangements in place, as business won’t stop, if anything it will increase.”

In the same survey respondents listed information storage (30%) and security (25%) as their biggest technology concerns for 2012.

“This tallies with what CIOs have been telling us about their concerns for 2012. The issue of information storage is made increasingly more complex by disparate global data legislation such as the USA PATRIOT act, the recent uptake of ‘BYOD’ (Bring Your Own Device), and the use of social media tools to share and store data. This creates ownership concerns and makes the tracking of data increasingly difficult,” comments Tim Cox, ControlCircle technical services director.

Tim adds, “Now, what we see is that the security threat has evolved to the point where a holistic strategy is required to link events and devices, rather than responding to individual occurrences”.

For further information on the survey, please contact Phillippa Chinery at ControlCircle, [email protected]. The survey was conducted at ControlCircle’s Disaster Recovery seminar and via LinkedIn, over March 2012. It asked CIOs, COOs and heads of IT departments a series of questions relating to business continuity and technology concerns for the year ahead.