Vista: Secure enough for hospital life support?

Journalist: Let’s imagine a hospital where life support systems are running Vista. Would you trust it with your life?

Bill Gates: . . . The answer to your question is that, absolutely, Vista is the most secure operating system we’ve ever done, and if it’s administered properly, absolutely, it can be used to run a hospital or any kind of mission critical thing. But it’s not as simple as saying “If you use Vista, that happens automatically”. The issues about patient records and who should be able to see them, the issue about setting up a network, so that authorized people can connect up to that hospital network, the issue about having backup power, so that the computer systems can run even if the generators go down. There are a lot of issues to properly set up that system, so that you have the redundancy and the security walls to make sure it fulfills that very critical function. So we are working with partners to raise their skills to make sure that when get involved in an installation like that they can make it secure. So I feel better about Vista than any other operating system, but there’s a lot of things that need to be done well, and we’re certainly committed to step up and make sure these security issues are easier and better understood.