'BlackBerry Secure' Wants to Be Fort Knox for Your Company's Mobile Devices
BlackBerry has unveiled BlackBerry Secure, a security platform designed to protect business networks and endpoints across the Internet of Things (IoT). This package includes protection for computers, mobile phones, sensors, wearables, and any other mobile technology you connect to a computer.
In September, BlackBerry said it would stop making smartphone hardware and focus solely on software licensing. For the previous 15 years, the company had been one of the premier manufacturers of mobile devices, including early two-way pagers and smartphones. Conversely, over the past year and a half, BlackBerry has dedicated its in-house resources and acquisitions to becoming a mobile services company designed specifically for security-conscious businesses.
Its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES12) product—when combined with BlackBerry-owned Good Dynamics, a mobile app security platform, and WatchDox, a file transfer service—offers BlackBerry clients an enterprise mobility management and mobile device management (MDM) suite that has been rated one of the best solutions on the market by Gartner Research and Forrester Research (both are gated links). BlackBerry Secure is the complete integration of those tools, as well as other recent BlackBerry acquisitions, such as Athoc and Encription.
New Nomenclature
BES12, Good Dynamics, and WatchDox have been renamed as part of the rebrand. BES12 is now called BlackBerry UEM; its main purpose will be to provide IT with the visibility to protect all mobile endpoints. Good Dynamics is now BlackBerry Dynamics; it will serve as the secure development platform for mobile applications. WatchDox is now BlackBerry Workspaces, and it will continue to serve as a secure document management platform for business.
Other previous Good Technology products will also be rebranded under the BlackBerry Secure umbrella. Good Work, a business collaboration tool, is now called BlackBerry Work. Access management systems, Good Access and Good Connect are now BlackBerry Access and BlackBerry Connect, respectively. Document-sharing app Good Share is now BlackBerry Share, and task-management tool Good Tasks is now BlackBerry Tasks.
The Recent BlackBerry Saga
Although the iPhone, which was unveiled in 2007, eventually overtook BlackBerry as the consumer smartphone of choice, it wasn't until 2011 that BlackBerry started to witness significant market share decreases.
In the fall of 2010, BlackBerry had more than 21 million US device users, down from its peak of 22 million users in 2010. However, by the end of 2012 the figure had decreased to only 9 million—thanks in large part to poor reviews for the BlackBerry Storm, as well as delays to the BlackBerry 10 operating system.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.