Telecom Lead India: BlackBerry Enterprise Solution offers the most secure mobile platform and the lowest total cost of ownership for mobile deployments, according to a research.
Strategy Analytics, in a study commissioned by Research In Motion (RIM), has examined UK government as an example for doing the research.
The research agency said the study examined mobile solution including device management and devices themselves for a 100 user smartphone deployment running at IL2, the minimum security standard for all Government departments including schools, health departments and local government.
It compared two recommended approaches to mobility: the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution and a ‘Walled Garden approach to mobility where any non-BlackBerry device is given VPN access to a secure limited zone on a network and is managed by third-party mobile device management software.
After one year, the cost to manage non-BlackBerry devices using a Walled Garden architecture was found to be 39 percent more expensive than BlackBerry devices in a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) deployment. The analysis further indicated that a Walled Garden approach would continue to cost more than the BlackBerry solution in subsequent years.
This study highlights that the cost of setting up and managing devices using a Walled Garden architecture is more expensive than using BlackBerry Enterprise Server with BlackBerry smartphones.
Andrew Brown, director of Enterprise Research at Strategy Analytics, said: “When looking to define a cost-efficient, long-term enterprise mobility strategy, we would caution all organizations across both the public and private sectors to look at the total cost of supporting multiple devices with multiple operating systems over several years.”
Strategy Analytics also assessed the security of the BlackBerry 7, Apple iOS 5, Symbian S60 and Windows Phone 7 (WP7) operating systems, using eleven key threats as a framework. The BlackBerry solution proved the most secure, scoring a low-threat level in ten of the eleven categories.
The report also found that the end-to-end architecture of the BlackBerry solution, including encryption for data-at-rest and in transit, mitigates the maximum amount of risk and offers essential support for corporate IT policies.
“As the only mobile solution to be approved by the UK government to protect material classified up to and including ‘Restricted, the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution continues to set the standard for mobile security,” said Scott Totzke, senior vice president, BlackBerry Security Group at RIM.
