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Become a BlackBerry SHIELD Advisor and Differentiate and Grow Your Business

Bad news about digital security abounds: phishing. hacking, malware, ransomware, and more. Everyone’s vulnerable, and only getting more so, as we generate more data from the Enterprise of Things and store it in the cloud.

Managing these risks is difficult for businesses—especially small to mid-sized companies who lack dedicated security departments. Their security challenge is your opportunity, and the SHIELD Advisor Program, part of the BlackBerry Enterprise Partner Program for Solution Providers, offers you an accelerated pathway into it.

If you are an independent software and solutions provider, becoming a trained BlackBerry SHIELD Advisor will help you stand out among competitors, positioned as a security expert aligned with one of the top cybersecurity service and software providers around. This will open up new sources of revenue for your business.

Growing Cybersecurity Market

The opportunity for businesses offering cybersecurity products and services is big and getting bigger.

Statistica shows the cybersecurity market growing from $122 billion USD in 2016 to $202 billion in 2021. BCC Research predicts the global cyber security market will grow from $85.3 billion USD in 2016 to $187.1 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts that by 2018, 90 percent of organizations worldwide will implement at least one form of integrated data loss prevention, up from 50 percent in 2016.

Why all the growth? Because security experts and hackers are engaged in an ongoing game of cat and mouse. When one finds and exploits a weakness, the other responds. Each one builds on the success of the other. Every organization needs to keep improving how it safeguards its IT assets, data, and privacy.

Become a Security Expert with the SHIELD Advisor Program

Now is a great time for partners to deepen their cybersecurity expertise, expand their offerings, and grow their businesses. That’s where SHIELD comes in. It gives partners access to BlackBerry’s comprehensive and effective mobile security framework to help their customers improve their security.

Available to Gold or Platinum partners with security credentials, the SHIELD Advisor Program—like our specialization for Workspaces, provides powerful tools, enhanced skills, and marketplace differentiation.

Powerful Tools

BlackBerry’s advanced research and development group, the Center for High Assurance Computer Excellence (CHACE), researched the leading public sources of commercial mobile security best practices (including the NIST SP 800-124 and the SANS Institute Mobile Device Checklist) and combined them with BlackBerry’s more than 20 years of industry expertise to create the BlackBerry SHIELD benchmarking program.

BlackBerry has been using the SHIELD assessment tool with multiple customers. We’ve also licensed it to Allied World Assurance Company Holdings, which has incorporated the tool into its FrameWRX cyber risk management solution. This is the very same tool that we are now offering to our top-tier partners.

Enhanced Skills

The SHIELD program trains partners to provide clients with an IT risk assessment, including their mobile environment. This is the vendor-agnostic and comprehensive Mobile Security Best Practices Assessment. The results will help your clients understand the nature and scope of their risk, see how they’re doing in comparison to their industry peers, and make informed decisions about how to best protect their organization going forward.

Marketplace Differentiation

Once you complete the training and achieve the specialization, you’ll also receive several marketing assets to help you show potential clients that your company has a significant level of industry experience and a close association with BlackBerry.

The SHIELD Advisor Badge is a graphic that partners can use on websites, marketing and sales documents, slide presentations and other collateral. You’ll also receive upsell recommendations, an enhanced listing in our Partner Locator, and other sales materials.

Give Yourself the Advantage with BlackBerry

BlackBerry has more than 20 years’ experience and 80+ certifications as a leader in the mobile security space. We want to share that knowledge with our partners, so you can bring it to your clients as well.

Most companies aren’t sufficiently secured, especially in their mobile environment. Each new high-profile hack, each new data leak that exposes a company’s secrets, each new ransomware attack that shuts down hospitals or other critical infrastructure is a painful reminder that business must do better. And you can help.

With analysts predicting huge spending on information security in the next five-to-ten years, now is the time to invest in boosting your security profile so you can expand your offering, and capitalize on this trend—before it’s too late.

Learn more about the SHIELD Advisor Program from this webcast.

Almudena Maneiro

About Almudena Maneiro

Passionate, curious and excited to experience firsthand how mobility is changing the way we work. Focused on partner success, I am currently responsible for developing global strategic initiatives and program innovations that help our enterprise partners to maximize the benefit from their relationship with BlackBerry. Follow me on twitter @amaneirom