The Delicate Balancing Act Between Security and Enablement
The global pandemic and its effect on business operations pushed many organizations to rapidly embrace digital transformation strategies. With the need to support a geographically dispersed—often home-based or remote—workforce, coupled with demand for goods and services moving to digital delivery models, many companies seized the opportunity to adopt more cloud-friendly architectures that offer long-term benefits to both the organization and its customers. At the same time, the rising frequency of malware and ransomware attacks has made it risky to pursue digitization plans that typically involve upgrading back-end business processes with expanded cloud and Internet connectivity.
These were considerations that one major East Asian bank took into account recently, choosing to prioritize security in its digital transformation efforts. It was a major factor in the bank’s decision to include an on-premises instance of BlackBerry® Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) as part of deploying BlackBerry® Enterprise Mobility Suite - Collaboration Edition across its environment.
A Milestone in Digital Transformation
As one of the largest banks in its region, the institution has a history that dates back decades. It offers a comprehensive array of services for both commercial and non-commercial clients, including online banking, mobile apps, and payment portal integration. It also leverages BlackBerry UEM to provide the majority of its employees with secure access to its email, while its application management functionality has allowed the bank to more effectively secure internal applications.
The bank primarily uses BlackBerry UEM to secure and manage a fleet of BYOD/COBD (bring your own device/company-owned business device) endpoints. For example, field agents can use their smartphones or tablets for secure email and personal information management. They’re also empowered with a secure intranet portal, ensuring that they have access to any internal resources they might require while out of the office.
Alongside these use cases, the bank has leveraged UEM to deploy a business-critical reporting app, reducing both administrative workload and the organization’s reliance on physical paper. This is the first step of a forward-looking roadmap by the bank, which eventually hopes to further embrace a paperless environment and distributed workplace by migrating to the cloud.
While the bank views that transformation as both desirable and inevitable, it also recognizes the need to approach it as an incremental journey, to be undertaken securely and strategically. The more systems and applications an organization attempts to transition at once, the likelier it becomes that its migration will have issues or even fail. BlackBerry UEM is one of the tools the bank will rely on to ensure this does not happen.
Reaching Toward a Cloud-Defined Future
Requiring less maintenance than physical infrastructure, a cloud environment also makes it easier to deploy and update business applications. The bank would have more freedom in terms of deploying applications, whether developed internally or externally. It could consequently place a much greater focus on workforce enablement.
Alongside BlackBerry UEM, the bank primarily uses an on-premises third-party email and productivity platform. Its eventual plan is to transition to a SaaS deployment of this solution, supported by BlackBerry UEM Cloud.
“We’ve spent a lot of time exploring the cloud capabilities of our vendors, such as BlackBerry UEM’s third-party integration capabilities,” notes the bank’s head of IT security. “We don’t want our users to have to re-implement everything. The migration has to be seamless, which effectively means it has to be phased—a big bang approach would be too disruptive,” he says.
“Our first step, in other words, will be to align a hybrid cloud environment with our existing systems,” he continues. “In the future, we may adopt full cloud-first architecture. Given that we’re currently still testing many of our potential integrations and solutions, it’s something to consider at a later date.”
He concludes, “For now, our journey with the BlackBerry team has been fantastic. Their solution is easy to use, feedback from our audience has been highly positive, and support—both locally and from the wider organization—has been great.”
Learn more about how the bank leverages BlackBerry® solutions by reading the case study here.
