BlackBerry’s Government Mobility Suite, a product of the Canadian company’s government-focused subsidiary BlackBerry Government Solutions announced in March, has been marked “ready” for final approval and made available on FedRAMP’s Marketplace, according to a June 11 news release.
As described on the company’s website, BlackBerry Government Mobility Suite is based on the company’s Unified Endpoint Management product, giving IT administrators one comprehensive view of all connected users, devices, applications and policies across endpoints on multiple operating systems and ownership models.
BlackBerry's AtHoc and CylancePROTECT solutions, for emergency notifications and cyberthreat detection respectively, also received FedRAMP authorizations in 2017. Continuous monitoring and required reporting for FedRAMP going forward will come from BlackBerry's U.S. Cyber Security Operations Center and Compliance staff, in its recently announced facility in Washington, D.C.
As an industry requirement for any cloud-software provider working with the federal government, FedRAMP approval can cost millions of dollars and years to achieve, and is increasingly relied upon by state and local governments, too. Endpoint protection tools with FedRAMP approval are not especially common, so far including one from CrowdStrike Falcon, and others from Palo Alto Networks, Lookout and SentinelOne listed on the agency’s website as “in process.”
"BlackBerry has been built on a foundation of trust, which is why governments, banks and other regulated industry organizations around the world use our software," said Bob Day, president of BlackBerry Government Solutions, in a statement. "We remain committed to taking BlackBerry's end-to end technology stack through FedRAMP's stringent requirements, so that government agencies can leverage the full suite of BlackBerry capabilities in an integrated and highly secure FedRAMP cloud solution."