[clemson1982]

I work for a sheriff's office and the county's IT department will not link our BB to our county e-mails. They state it is a security issue in that they feel the county system could be hacked. I have never heard of such a thing from any other business. I'm not a technical guy, but this doesn't seem accurate. The IT guy told me that they have a server on site, but it is not connected and it would be costly to "reactive" the server. Is this true?

[dictoresno]

top level government agencies use BlackBerry devices in all areas from low level to high level security. its pretty much agreed upon that blackberry data and BES is very secure and free from hacking, per se, and viruses.

the county may not just want the spend the money on implementing BES into their network, as it can be costly. i would imagine theres fairly low level security information going through just your emails. sounds like they are just really unfamiliar with the way BES operates and just dont wanna spend the cash.

[Tiassa]

I'm with dictoresno, I'm guessing it is more of a cost (and maybe support) issue than security. BB's are about as secure as wireless e-mail can be.

[AmigaDude]

From a BES perspective, you are probably both correct about the cost issue, especially for a small local gov't IT department. But, they do have security concerns if someone wanted to use a BIS connection to their email servers.

[Username5300]

Maybe the security threat isn't hacking into the BES but adding a device that is not county or state owned violates their policies. My company will not let personal devices on our BES for that reason. Yes the licensing is very expensive for this.

[bluz]

BES is the standard in wireless e-mail security.

[JRSCCivic98]

^^^ lol....

[Tim_UK]

If it's your personal devices I can understand them not wanting to setup BES just for the few people using them, not only would it be a total ballache to setup for a smaller local government organisation who may not even have an experienced BES admin, but also if they don't have anyone who knows BES they'll not know how to implement IT policies and force certain security procedures onto a device, hence their concerns which probably stem more from fear of lost/stolen devices or user error than hacking. Besides all this if it was my own device I'd not want to sign over that much control over it to my employer.

If they've issued you with BB's and they have the equipment and knowledge to run a BES setup they're probably just being cheap and not wanting to pay for licenses, so fobbing you off by claiming it's security related.

I don't know much about BES although I'm sure when setup correctly the security of BES is pretty robust, my employer uses it and they're just about the most paranoid organisation I've come across when it comes to data integrity/protection.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[gnahc79]

The IT guy told me that they have a server on site, but it is not connected and it would be costly to "reactive" the server. Is this true?

Exactly what does this mean? They had a BES server but it's disconnected now? Or they had a server that could run BES but it's offline (they never ran BES before)? The cost to get #2 up and running is high. The cost to get #1 running apparently is too high if it's offline now.


Tim_UK has a great explanation. If your employer issued you BBs, then the security is good as long as IT has BES set up properly. If it's a personal BB(BIS) wanting to connect to a BES then yes that could be a security issue and definitely an additional cost.

[MobileMadness002]

If only using BIS, the user would have to keep their email login credentials on a third party web site. The BIS relay. BES is secure. BIS as far as the officials are concerned is not. This is also the reason that a few US military branches do not allow users to access their Military email using BIS.