The Department of Defense today issued its Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan geared toward securely opening up its networks to devices from multiple platforms.
Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said the initiative is not a BYOD program, but simply a more cost-effective solution and a move toward mobile interoperability for both its unclassified and classified devices.
The DoD’s standard of Blackberry use still holds for the most part, Pickart said, with Blackberries accounting for 470,000 of the 600,000 mobile devices the Department currently has deployed.
But those numbers could shift as Pickart said the Department will move toward a multi-vendor solution for mobile device management and in developing a department-wide app store.
Blackberry has long relied on its enterprise and government customers who have in turn relied up the Canadian OEM for its device security. BlackBerry’s Enterprise Service 10 has a big task ahead to maintain that market dominance as BYOD introduces more consumer devices to the workplace and other platforms and OEMs continue to make strides in mobile security.
In the release, the DoD also expressed it must “streamline the approval process for commercial mobile devices and to enable timely deployment and use of this constantly evolving technology.”
Filed Under: Devices
