Secure Enterprise Work Space Technology for Android and iOS Previewed by BlackBerry

BlackBerry today confirmed that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 platform will soon be able to deliver the necessary technology to truly separate and secure work and personal data on mobile devices other than BlackBerry. More specifically we mean here, of course, iOS and Android. With Secure Work Space for iOS and Android, BlackBerry’s flagship enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution becomes truly multiplatform.

Secure Work Space for iOS and Android will be made available as an update to BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, and will soon extend BlackBerry security capabilities for data-at-rest and data-in-transit, providing complete separation between work and personal data for those platforms. Secure Work Space includes secured client applications for e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, secure browsing and document editing for every device that is provisioned via BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 offers administrators a single, intuitive platform, enabling the effective and secure management of more or less all of the most common devices now found in corporate BYOD environments.

Secure Work Space should save businesses, as well as the government sector – a major market segment for BlackBerry – considerable effort, expense and consequently cost, as the solution obviates the need to configure and manage expensive VPN infrastructures to provide mobile device access to data and applications that reside behind corporate firewalls. Secure Work Space delivers end-to-end EMM services, providing a straightforward deployment process and a global and flexible technical support model. Additional applications can easily be secured and added to the workspace, without the need to modify source code.

A closed beta testing process for Secure Work Space is now underway. General availability is expected approximately around the end of Q2 2013. BlackBerry notes that additional details will be announced at the upcoming BlackBerry Live conference when it is held on May, 2013 in Orlando, Florida.

As BlackBerry continues its quest to regain some of its former glory - or really we should say, some of its former enterprise authority – the bedrock for BlackBerry lies entirely in the realm of complete end-to-end security, or at least BlackBerry hopes this will be the case. Over the last few years, even as BYOD has become the common way for most enterprises to operate, there has been less hardcore emphasis on securing BYOD devices. Typically one of the mobile device management (MDM) vendors will deliver adequate security. This is also the case for securing applications as the MDM vendors transition into mobile application management vendors.

In the old days, BlackBerry was truly the only game in town for delivering end-to-end security; however, that is no longer true, and it will remain the case going forward. For BlackBerry to succeed, it has to find enough customers that will buy into its EMM philosophy. There is no doubt the company will find enough of them to keep BlackBerry going. The question is whether or not there will be enough of them to turn BlackBerry back into the thriving business it once was.