Protecting Wimbledon: 'Data is at the heart of everything we do'
Whether in sport or security, it’s all about data
The IBM Cloud is the bedrock all Wimbledon analytics rest on
Lawn tennis has evolved since Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented the rules in the 19th century. The net is shorter. The court is rectangular, not an hourglass shape. And in the pro scene, data rules the roost.
"Data is at the heart of everything we do," says Kevin Farrar, Head of Sport Partnerships at IBM UK. Kevin leads the Data Bunker, IBM's partnership with the Wimbledon tournament, which works on new ways to collect and use the information coming from the courts.
One team, for example, is solely dedicated to data collection. They can replay shots in super slow-mo to determine whether a shot was an ace or if it clipped a racket, for example.
"It's about speed and accuracy, especially for the show courts where the action is going out live and broadcast."
Three pillars of data
The bunker team handles many data sources, which Farrar divides into three areas.
First are the players themselves. Each one has their own data set: their height, weight, play history and so on.
Next is the information Wimbledon collects - things like shot speed and data from Hawk-Eye, a computer vision system that tracks shots using very high-definition cameras.
"[Hawk-Eye] is used for the challenge system, but it's actually tracking all of the Wimbledon players and the ball, and that enables you to identify other insights like how far a player has to stretch to which ball, etc, etc."
The final pillar is unstructured data like news articles, sports journals and social media.
After collection, IBM runs the data through a series of "services and containerised apps," running on Red Hat OpenShift in the IBM Cloud, for insights into everything from the play at Wimbledon to how people are interacting with the tournament.
And there's one other area of insight. It's not public-facing, and most of the public will probably never think about it - but infrastructure monitoring is critical to maintaining Wimbledon's cybersecurity
Protecting Wimbledon: 'Data is at the heart of everything we do'
Whether in sport or security, it’s all about data
The IBM Cloud is the bedrock all Wimbledon analytics rest on
Securing Centre Court
"The Championships, like any global sporting event, grabs the attention of people that we'd rather not," says Farrar. "So, we have a number of security products and solutions in the suite that we have to deal with this."
One of those is IBM Randori, for attack surface analysis. It looks at potential threats and how to deal with them, which is especially important during the peak weeks in June and July.
"The traffic that comes to Wimbledon.com obviously grows exponentially in the lead-up to and during the tournament, so making sure we're prepared is like making sure your house is secure before you go on holiday: making sure the doors and windows are shut and locked, your security camera's working and your burglar alarm's set."
With the attack surface prepared, the team turns to another IBM product - QRadar SIEM - to monitor infrastructure, "making sure we can identify the needle in the haystack."
There's "a lot of mundane [cybersecurity] stuff" that goes on during the two weeks of Wimbledon, which Farrar broadly categorises as "people having a poke."
Those are low-energy attacks, but still need to be stopped. What the IBM systems are really investigating is "patterns of events that then get reclassified as an incident."
"That alerts the team and then the team, because they've done that prep work, can then address that quickly and effectively."
Wimbledon is one of the most important events of the tennis calendar - purists would argue the most important. And while the chino-wearing, blazer-sporting crowd above may not give them a second thought, it is the team in three small rooms underneath the tournament's Media Centre who ensure play can go on.