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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."
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.
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.
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.