Blackberry Ltd. has tapped a former chief information officer with the U.S. Coast Guard to oversee cybersecurity efforts for its cloud tools and services used by federal agencies, a company spokeswoman confirmed Thursday.
Robert Day, a retired rear admiral and information-technology veteran, will direct the company’s federal cybersecurity services as head of a planned Federal Cybersecurity Operations Center, which will seek to ensure products and services meet government-wide requirements.
ENLARGEThe center, which has yet to be finalized, will provide security monitoring, compliance reporting and incident response for federal agencies, while guiding Blackberry’s compliance initiatives for so-called FedRAMP and authority-to-operate certifications. A site for the physical location of the center has yet to be determined, the spokeswoman said.
FedRamp is a government-wide program that sets standards for security assessments, authorization and monitoring for cloud vendors in the federal marketplace.
Blackberry’s federal government clients currently include the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard, according to the spokeswoman. The services it offers include the Blackberry Enterprise Server 12, a device-management platform, and WatchDox, a file-sharing service that allows users to access, synchronize, edit and share files and folders.
Before retiring in 2014, Mr. Day served for five years as CIO and Commander of Coast Guard Cyber Command for the U.S. Coast Guard. Prior to that he held a variety of senior IT and command positions in the Coast Guard for more than 30 years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Blackberry, known primarily as a mobile device maker, recently shifted its focus to software and services for both private- and public-sector customers. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company in September announced that it would stop making its once ubiquitous smartphones.
While its share of the global smartphone market has dropped below 1%, software and services revenue more than doubled from a year earlier in the latest quarter, to $156 million.
Blackberry CIO Iain Kennedy said Mr. Day’s experience with cybersecurity “at the strategic and operations levels within the military and civilian agency environments” would help boost deployments of the company’s cloud tools and services across the federal government.
Mr. Day has a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, as well as a master’s degree in telecommunications systems management from the Naval Postgraduate School.
[Source:-Wall street Journal]
