Amazon May Be Going Head-to-Head with Microsoft in Healthcare

Mary Jo Foley | ZDNet | July 27, 2017

Amazon isn't the only one of the big cloud vendors looking to expand its healthcare footprint. Microsoft's been there, done that, and is continuing to invest in the space.

In the doorway of a low-ceilinged room with harsh strip lighting, Klaid Magi is looking tired. Behind him, the mess suggests this has not been a standard day at the office. The bins are overflowing with empty Coke cans, the desks are covered in snack wrappers, and the room probably smelled a whole lot fresher a few hours earlier. Magi's team, a small band of about two dozen now-weary security experts, wander between the rows of PCs and whiteboards scrawled with notes, gradually recovering from a day spent as the last defense of a tiny nation against a massive cyberattack.

Magi's usual job is running Estonia's Computer Emergency Response Team, but today he's been in charge of protecting the fictional country of Berylia from unknown aggressors. The team of defenders, operating from a nondescript tower block in a suburb of the Estonian capital Tallinn, is just one of a number taking part in an international cyberdefence exercise aimed at preparing them to tackle the real thing.

The two-day exercise, organized by a NATO-affiliated cyber defence think tank, aims to test the skills of these teams at defending a range of technology--from PCs and servers to air traffic control systems...It's the end of the first day of the game (unlike a real cyberwar the game is slightly more civilised and keeps to standard business hours) and the Estonian team, considered to be one of the strongest playing, feels it has weathered the storm so far, managing to protect the systems of the fictional air base they are defending...