Along with AT&T encryption, what’s se- cret stays secret and is backed by a net- work-based firewall. In the event of an attack on the Williams team, the threat triggers an alert to both AT&T operations centre and to the user who is automati- cally rerouted and probably won’t realize the danger.
Back at the track, the teams all seem happy to be back in Montreal, which missed out on the race last year due to a case of politics and money squabbles that seem to haunt this big money sport. With its nightlife and popular track, Montreal is a home away from home for the Euro- peans on the 19th
race of the tour.
“Our currency in F1 is a tenth of second,” says Burns. “So we really need the data to optimize the performance. At the Spanish Grand Prix, for example, we used the sensors to assess whether the new type of shock absorbers we installed were helping or not.” With Ferrari, Toyota, Honda and all the other F1 teams just as eager to shave 1/10th of a second off their own lap times, securing that torrent of data is mission critical and ef- fectively is AT&T’s responsibility. After all, you wouldn’t want anyone “cheating” by making it too easy to poach that data.
“The data is important, of course,” says the young, blonde and tall Hülkenberg, who looks as though he could have had a successful career as a male model if he hadn’t taken up go-karting as a kid and graduated to F1. “In the end though you just have to drive by feel. I depend on the crew looking at the data to tell me what’s going on so we can have the best race possible.” For AT&T, a telecommunication’s giant the world over, being the title sponsor of a F1 team is a chance to showcase its ex- pertise in networking and security. And while the Williams team is a relatively small business with some 500 employees, its data demands are on par with a global conglomerate. It needs fail-safe data transmission in real time and it needs to ensure no one can hack in or otherwise siphon off that data.
Similar to most of today’s businesses, they need a secure virtual private network
22 SECURITY MATTERS • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010
for basic communication channels and secure transmission of e-mails that buzz back and forth among the tightly knit group.
Race intensity aside, the day to day op- erational demands would be familiar to any CIO, with AT&T leveraging a cloud strategy to create a scalable and reliable global IP network that is vigilantly scanned for viruses and root kits.
As such it is part of the company’s network that carries a staggering 18.7 PetaBytes of data traffic daily to almost every continent and country. The com- ponents include a secure e-mail gateway to protect against viruses, phishing scams and other malware threats — technology that is also applied to the In- ternet itself.
Going into the weekend, AT&T Williams was in seventh place in the overall standings and managed to finish 13th
and 14th , out of the points, in a race
that was dominated by the McLaren and Ferrari teams. It was a frustrating race as Barrichello collided early on, which left him with damage to the left brake cooling duct, thus resulting in a soggy pedal and too much time lost on the turns. As for the 22-year-old Hülkenberg, he got a little over-eager and rear ended another car, had to pit to replace his front wing and then was penalized for breaking the pit lane speed limit – costing him more time. The network and the data, however, performed without a hiccup.
Ian Harvey is a freelance writer in T oronto, Ont.
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