Pentagon ponders “Plan B” for a world without BlackBerry

Pentagon ponders “Plan B” for a world without BlackBerry

Nov 13th 2013, 03:35, by Sean Gallagher

RIM's BlackBerry and PlayBook devices still are the only mobile devices with "authority to operate" on DOD networks. That could end soon.

Sean Gallagher

The US Department of Defense is now pondering a future without BlackBerry as uncertainty grows about the company's future in the wake of its aborted effort to go private. That promises to be a major pain for the Pentagon, given its dependence on the Canadian company's secure e-mail capabilities.
The DOD is one of BlackBerry's biggest customers, with over 470,000 handsets deployed to key personnel. Despite the Army's flirting with Apple iOS and Google Android devices, and despite the certification by the DOD of Samsung's Knox platform for use by military personnel, BlackBerry devices are the only ones granted "authority to operate" on the DOD's internal networks—the highest level of operational integration allowed for mobile devices. Just this summer, the Pentagon was planning to acquire and deploy up to 30,000 BlackBerry 10 devices by the end of the year. And the DOD is such an important customer for BlackBerry that before any Blackberry 10 devices even shipped, the company made getting them certified as compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) a top priority.
But now, Government Executive reports that the Pentagon is preparing for a future where the BlackBerry is at least less dominant. A key contract for mobile device management from the Defense Information Systems Agency—the DOD's internal tech supplier of choice—went to BlackBerry competitor DMI this summer. And as the DOD moves forward with its Mobile Agenda—an effort to largely move from desktop computers to mobile devices—its technology leaders are looking farther afield to make the transition. "This multi-vendor, device-agnostic approach minimizes the impact of [a] single vendor to our current operations," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart told Government Executive.