How BlackBerry Is Riding iOS and Android To Power Its Comeback

alancronin sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "... the trend that brutally undercut BlackBerry phones during the past five years — the 'bring your own device' movement — is now driving significant sales of BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES), the company's backend software. 'Our customers have been asking, "Can you just take what you've done on BlackBerry and put it on iOS and Android?"' said Pete Devenyi, BlackBerry's SVP of Enterprise Software. ... Secure Work Space will be an app in the Apple App Store and Google Play, pending approval from Apple and Google, respectively. It will include secure email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and document editing. It won't allow data leakage including copy and paste between Secure Work Space and the rest of the device. IT will be able to remotely wipe everything in the Secure Work Space without affecting any of the other apps or data on the person's device, in a BYOD scenario."

Comments

Already a few services out there

[thechanklybore]

This is exactly the same as Good ( http://www1.good.com/applications/good-for-enterprise ) and Samsung Knox is something similar.

I wonder if they'll manage to carve out a place for themselves based on BES inertia. However, having administered BES, I sincerely hope they do the dodo.

Re:Already a few services out there

[IntermodalAgain]

The only thing that kept a couple of users on Blackberry in my last job was the free international messaging on Blackberry's system. Doing business overseas, people found that to be the one perk that kept them from switching. Now, free messengers are becoming common enough that even those specific users no longer care. One switched to iPhone and I don't know what the other main Blackberry guy is running at this point, as we haven't kept in touch.

Blackberry Enterprise

[IntermodalAgain]

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.

Re:Blackberry Enterprise

[trybywrench]

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.

Re:Blackberry Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model.

Are you insane? Or you just have no idea what a blackberry enterprise server (BES) does?

The BES manages strong encryption (AES by default) on the devices. The encryption keys are found only in two places: one the BES, and on the blackberry itself.

The mobile carrier doesn't have the keys, and RIM doesn't have the keys. So if a government comes calling with a warrant, RIM doesn't have anything to give them. It's a very elegant design.

The BES can force mandatory policies onto the blackberries, such as strong full-disk encryption, strong passwords, remote tracking, remote wiping, remote locking, wiping if the phone doesn't check in regularly, restricting what apps can access, and many, many other things.

There are a number of very smart & paranoid people at RIM who have thought long and hard about different attack scenarios and how to prevent them. That's why blackberry has been certified by many governments, NATO, and others: http://us.blackberry.com/business/topics/security/certifications.html

Unfortunately, the market doesn't seem to be interested in strong security and is far more interested in giving up all their personal/company information in return for the latest shiny device. Sad.

Re:Blackberry Enterprise

[tlhIngan]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/rim_keys_india/

What, again?

RIM certainly has SOME part of the code and as such they can give out the relevant stuff to the authorities, including the BASE KEYS.

That 'government certification' nonsense is just that.

Uh, no.

You're confusing the consumer "internet edition" with "Enterprise edition".

Internet edition blackberries are what you get when you go to your carrier and buy it on a blackberry plan and they give you email and all that. In which case, what happens is your blackberry connects to RIM's servers and gets your mail through RIM proxying to your carrier's email inbox.

BES though is different. You pair a blackberry with BES and they generate a set of keys. Your blackberry proxies its connection with RIM to reach BES. When it gets to BES, the data transferred is using the key set up during pairing. End to end, it's encrypted.

What RIM did with India was set up a RIM server in there, so internet edition phones proxy through it, and then onto the carrier email server. When a BES attached one does it, the link is still encrypted because that server does not have the key.

Basically, all BB traffic goes through RIM or a RIM server set up in the middle east or india or wherever. From there, the server is what contacts the mail server you're using. As that part is unencrypted, they can decrypt your email and such at that point.

HOWEVER, use BES, and what happens is the RIM server connects to your BES server and your BES server then communicates to your blackberry via the pre-shared key. No one can snoop on that email because its encrypted with keys only your blackberry and BES know. Even with those servers they can't examine your traffic because the server does not have the key.

Of course, the bigger question is who buys a blackberry and NOT use BES with it...

Re:Blackberry Enterprise

[geoskd]

The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is still the BB by FAR. I'd list iOS as #2 because of their limited hardware selection and OS updates.

Bzzzt, wrong.

The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is whatever the user shows up with because the corporation doesn't have to shell out several hundreds of dollars, and in most cases, $50+ per month for every user. If your company has 300k employees, phone plans alone will run you $180M / year. Off loading that expense to your employees is not trivial. Now add the cost of a new BB for each one of them every two years (or however long they last on average), and you're looking at another $100M a year. That is not small change to any organization, and not having to pay it is worth a lot of wrangling on the back end.

Re:Talking out both side of their mouth

[IntermodalAgain]

I think if the tablet market dies, it will die because of the gigantic phone that doubles as a tablet market. Really though, tablets are not a standalone device. They're an accessory and a document viewer. They've found a niche in a lot of industries that have been clamoring for a basic digital reader. Airlines and medical have been dabbling in iPads, and shipping companies have been using such devices for a long time. I doubt tablets will ever take over computing, but I think they'll have a place for many years to come.

Re:I want one

[ultracompetent]

Actually the key here is that you can remote wipe only the corporate data. Some people are not keen in connecting a BYOD to a corporate email service if that service gets snoop, wipe, and enforces security policies over your whole device, (including personal email, apps, etc.) This sounds like a reasonable tradeoff .. give the corporation a walled off area of your phone that they can enforce policy over and allow you to still own the device and services you pay for out of your own pocket.

Oh Good

[bufke]

I hope it makes Android and iOS fully dependent on a desktop (windows only) computer and heavy weight BES server (windows only). I sure hope it changes the software so to do anything on the phone itself I have to memorize commands that aren't in any menu option.

I can't wait to have BBM. That will teach those bad employees who think they can choose their own xmpp client with Google Chat.

Sorry, disgruntled BES admin rant. Just shut it down a few months ago! Life is great!

Re:I want one

[TheGratefulNet]

can apple wipe just the 'work' portion and leave the personal (my email, etc) alone?

no?

then shut the hell up, then.

I was asked by the folks at my work to install exchange stuff so I can run outlook (sigh). I started the install when a dialog came up asking if I will grant 'whole device wipe' privs to the IT guys. fuck no! its MY device! whole system wipe? really? JUST because I want to install calendering from exchange on my phone?

I canceled and so far, my home phone has no work stuff on it.

it would be really nice to be able to keep them separate and risk-free.

apple has nothing like this, do they? normally, its an all or nothing wipe, just like outlook 'wants'.

Re:Talking out both side of their mouth

[IntermodalAgain]

Even if tablets do "take over" as a primary computing device, I very much doubt they will be much more than interfaces to some kind of cloud service at that point.

We're already using this

[Dr.Zong]

We're using this. BES5 server for the old devices. BES10 BDS (BlackBerry Device Server) for a couple Q10s and a couple Playbooks, then UDS (Universal Device Server) for a bunch of ipads. All three servers are managed by one interface, Mobile Fusion. For us, it's not about "hey, apple has this" or "hey android already has this" it's about "hey, I can manage these all from one console". Saves a tonne of time, and a tonne of hassle. I am not super happy that with BDS/UDS they moved to Active Sync, but our AS Server is behind a firewall and we have the UDS devices set to VPN in automatically to get to it. The BDS devices are "in the network" like the old BES stuff and don't need a VPN. Hell, I had a case open with BlackBerry as I needed RRAS and the UDS/BDS working on one server, long story short, it looks like a KB article will be made based on that support case.

Re:Talking out both side of their mouth

[alexander_686]

It’s not “Tablets” taking over, it is the Thin Client model that is taking over. High internet speeds make this possible but tablets make it portable.

Re:Copy and paste

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not meant to be a feature to protect from users themselves leaking the data. I think it's designed against malware which could try to "emulate" user's behavior. Where does the user need to copy contacts from his corporate address book besides corporate e-mail which is provided by the same app anyway?

Why tablets failed before.

[sjbe]

People laughed at the Tablet PC concept ~10 years ago... I laughed at it too mainly due to the ~$3000 price tag back then.

They didn't laugh at the concept, they laughed at the (pathetic) implementation. Microsoft tried to overlay using a stylus on windows as a sort of keyboard/mouse hybrid which is NOT what a stylus is good for. A stylus is good for *drawing* and nothing else. We take notes with a pen and what we are doing is drawing. The fact that we can draw characters is just a bonus side effect. Microsoft fundamentally misunderstood how a pen/stylus works and what it is good for.

I would actually love a tablet with a stylus option with the condition that the stylus be used for drawing ONLY. Not navigation (like a mouse) or as mass text input device (like a keyboard) but as a drawing tool in the same way we use it with a pen and notebook. That would be terrifically useful. But so far every developer gets all excited about character recognition or mistakes it for a mouse and screws up the interface in the process. The reason tablets are working well today is because they finally designed systems adjusted the operating system interface to be designed for finger input from the ground up.