Migrating data center infrastructure to the cloud is a good first step toward enhancing organizational agility, but companies don’t realize the full benefits until they also modernize their applications.
The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) National Team Football (NTF) is completing the transition with the help of Atos, its Official Information Technology Partner until 2030.
Atos’ CloudCatalyst is a comprehensive migration and modernization solution developed in cooperation with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Atos Delivery Partner for UEFA EURO 2024™. CloudCatalyst uses an industrialized migration methodology and solution accelerators to ensure efficient and low-risk transitions while incorporating robust security measures and governance protocols to maintain data integrity and compliance throughout the migration process.
Leveraging Atos’ extensive experience with cloud migration and application modernization initiatives, CloudCatalyst goes beyond traditional infrastructure outsourcing with a streamlined, secure, and efficient pathway to cloud adoption.
The UNTF project aims to improve scalability and performance during peak usage times. That was critical, because the 2024 tournament needed to support more than 2.6 million spectators and 5.2 billion TV viewers, along with more than 500 million visits to the UEFA EURO 2024™ website and app.
As the official IT partner of UNTF, Atos was pivotal in delivering IT services to support the tournament. Atos managed 200 applications and deployed innovative solutions such as the Football Service Platform, which provides real-time results, lineups, live match events, players’ status, rankings, and other data to all UEFA stakeholders.
Fan engagement was enhanced through UEFA’s mobile and gaming apps. Nearly 1.3 billion email and push notifications were sent, and almost 4.2 million new app registrations were recorded.
With 200 staff across 10 venues and remote locations, Atos ensured seamless operations, deploying 1,480 laptops, 1,500 mobile phones, and advanced access control systems to scale critical infrastructure to meet global demand, with zero security incidents.
Tournament organizers had access to AWS’s extensive suite of services, including analytics, computing, databases, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and storage.
Critical for Europe, CloudCatalyst also supports sustainability objectives, by enabling significant carbon footprint reduction through optimized cloud infrastructure.
Modernization is being done in stages, with existing applications first shifted to the cloud and then rebuilt into a microservices architecture using cloud-native constructs.
The biggest challenge was the interdependency of services in the legacy infrastructure. Atos addressed this by migrating services with strong dependencies as a group and applying changes to both the legacy and cloud environments during the migration.
Although the modernization initiative is still ongoing, UEFA has already seen significant benefits:
- Data replication is simpler, and scalability is automated.
- Monolithic applications are being reconstructed as smaller components for easier maintenance and better scalability.
- Maintenance overhead is reduced through the use of packaged services from AWS.
- The organization also anticipates that the cloud environment will provide better visibility into cost and improved application reliability.
With an eight-year partnership established in 2022, Atos and UEFA continue to collaborate closely, with Atos providing ongoing support for daily management and enhancement of UEFA’s global systems and applications. The partnership also aims to ensure that the UEFA is well prepared to deliver exceptional experiences at future events such as the UEFA Nations League Final in 2025.
The Atos/UEFA National Team Football partnership dramatizes the benefits of partnering with an experienced digital transformation leader that understands its clients’ business and challenges.
Visit Official IT Partner for UEFA – Atos to learn more.