BlackBerry expands 'BBM Protected' service to all devices using Balance

More security for your BB-buck, or just another marketing effort?

BlackBerry has announced that it is expanding availability of its BBM Protected service to BlackBerry Balance-enabled devices. Effectively, this brings end-to-end secure messaging to enterprise customers beyond just BlackBerry 10 and BBOS users.

The move appears to be one of the company's more positive recent initiatives to back up its promises to become a mobile device management firm beyond the remit of its own ecosystem, as it continues to try to drum up support in the enterprise from IT managers who, in many cases, seem immune to the message.

From CIOs adopting BB10 for now, but talking of widening their future options, to organisations dumping the ecosystem wholesale, BlackBerry is having trouble shaking off the psychology that links its hardware and its software.

The company is vaunting BBM as a communication method for the enterprise which, beyond its strange reputation for assisting the London riots a couple of years ago, could be the perfect solution for regulated industries that require maximum security in their comms.

"This advanced encryption model has been designed to protect security-conscious organisations from threats like spying, hacking, accidental data leakage, non-compliance and more," said BlackBerry in a blog post.

"As the only secure IM client to use a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module, making it secure enough for government communications, we're confident that BBM Protected lives up to the demanding needs of our most security-conscious customers."

BlackBerry said that enabling BlackBerry Protected is as simple as "turning on an IT policy through the BES console". This, of course, is assuming that the company in question is still using BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Are you a CIO using BES for your company MDM service? Are you sticking with it, or moving on? Let us know.