On Jan. 30, RIM, now officially BlackBerry, released its much-anticipated new BlackBerry 10 operating system and associated devices. Along with BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, the company now offers a “single pane of glass” to manage devices running BlackBerry, Android and iOS. So what does this mean for enterprises and their bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and mobile device management (MDM) strategies?
Thanks to BYOD, gone are the days of one single mobile device manufacturer or model to support. And, as employees juggle multiple devices, enterprises of all sizes are struggling to securely support and manage mixed OS environments.
When organizations look to tackle mobility, security and policy enforcement is often the first area of focus. Knowing which devices are securely connecting to the networks through access control mechanisms, and securing the actual end devices themselves are two of the key building blocks to ensure mobile security. MDM is a key tool for assisting with protecting organizations; however, MDM alone will not be sufficient. Secure enterprise mobility requires organizations to consider a wide range of IT and business silos to ensure the correct strategy is executed – from understanding the current state of “mobility maturity” to all the interdependencies spanning users, devices, networks, applications, operations and adaptive security.
BlackBerry has re-entered a very crowded market of MDM vendors – with further consolidation likely this year and beyond. Only time will tell whether its approach and strategy to mixed environments will work for today's enterprises in what many people argue is a market it created in 1999. For those environments with a BlackBerry fleet and other devices being added, the approach seems to be sound and will provide administrators with a single console versus multiple platforms for device management.
