Who Does Mobile Security Better Than BlackBerry? Nobody.

As BlackBerry’s CEO, my days are filled with lots of conversations, and lots of questions. One of my favorites is about our unified endpoint management, or UEM: What is it, and why do I think it’s the best and most secure on the market?

I have two answers: One is simple, and the other is more complicated. Scroll down if you just want the simple answer, because I’m going to start with the “complicated” one.

First off, UEM is a fancy term for something you probably already have running in your technology stack. For mobile devices, it typically combines two important functions: MDM (mobile device management) and MAM (mobile application management). It’s what protects the full range of mobile and personal devices in your environment — mobile phones, tablets, and even Chromebook™ and other devices that don’t run a typical desktop operating system, like Windows® or macOS®. If your UEM doesn’t protect all those devices, regardless of their operating systems, that’s the first clue that your UEM solution may have some gaps.

Having a robust, end-to-end UEM solution is incredibly important these days because of how much our organizations have pivoted to relying on remote workers — and the BYOD and personal devices they now use on our behalf. Securing those devices has become as important as any security initiative or directive at your company today. Why? Because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and these personal mobile devices often represent the weakest link in an organization’s security portfolio.

So here are a few reasons why I believe our UEM is superior. These points aren’t really “complicated,” but they are specific. They are technical differentiators, and each addresses critical gaps that exist in other MDM, MAM and UEM solutions — gaps that create risk for your operations, and that our BlackBerry® UEM uniquely eliminates:

• Data encryption: If your UEM solution relies on the underlying OS for encryption, you may be encrypting your data only when the device is “locked.” What about when the mobile device is in use and not locked? We recommend a UEM solution that provides local, on-device encryption for all data — locked or unlocked, at rest or in transit.

• Connectivity to data, apps and resources: If your UEM solution relies on a VPN to provide remote access to internal resources, and to connect to SaaS applications that reside “outside the firewall,” you may be limiting what your workers can accomplish with their devices. We recommend a solution that provides you with maximum control over which assets workers can access, without reliance on a VPN. The best solutions, in my opinion, are designed to reduce the “attack surface” of your devices. This can be accomplished by replacing outdated VPN connections with a secure IP tunnel that allows tighter access controls, and by eliminating open inbound ports to your environment.

• Flexible deployment: We recommend a UEM solution that supports a wide range of deployment scenarios, like BYOD implementations that involve secure containers on personal mobile devices, and enterprise activations with use cases that require secure access to “behind the firewall” resources.

• Support for a robust multi-vendor ecosystem: We recommend a UEM solution that focuses on the mission-critical applications that matter most to your business. Yes, access to productivity apps in your office suite must be seamless and secure, but that’s not enough. Your UEM solution should support the highest levels of security across an expanded ecosystem of trusted applications — including legacy apps that may have been developed in-house.

Those are some specific reasons why I can confidently say, I think our UEM is the best in the market.

But I also promised you a simple reason, so here it is: Because we’re BlackBerry. We invented secure mobile communications, and we have spent decades improving and perfecting it. You’d be hard-pressed to find another company that has invested more time and R&D dollars into securing and hardening mobile devices, to make them as safe and workplace-ready as possible. So whatever you are currently running to protect your mobile endpoints, we can improve it.

I rest my case.

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