Blackberry has announced plans for supporting a technology to separate work and personal data similar to its own platform on Android and iOS devices. This software which will be known as Secure Work Space will be designed to work on top on Blackberry Enterprise Service 10 which was recently announced to be a cross platform device management platform. The beta testing for this service has already been started and is expected to be rolled out before June. It will enable organizations to manage data across all the three major platforms easily and will also ease the work for every organization’s IT department who will no longer need to implement a VPN to provide access to secure data.
As the name suggests, the software will create a separate secure space for applications that hold enterprise data like email, calendar, contacts etc. Apart from these third party applications will also be allowed to be added to this secure space. This functionality will imitate the “Balance” feature found in the Blackberry 10 platform that was recently released by the company. It allows users to seamlessly switch between personal and work applications, thus providing a separate and secure yet unified environment on the same device. David Smith, from Blackberry’s mobile enterprise computing division said, “With secure work space, we’re extending as many of these features as possible to other platforms.”
This service will provide a new avenue for future business and is expected put a stop to the Canadian giant’s declining revenue. However, the increasingly popular Samsung devices have a similar enterprise offering for its own devices like Samsung Knox and Samsung for Enterprise (SAFE) which is bound to give a tough competition to Blackberry’s services on the Android platform, given the fact that Samsung in one of the top manufacturer of Android devices.
