Navy bidding adieu to BlackBerry

After having served as the staple for mobile communications within the Navy for a dozen years, the venerable BlackBerry is finally on its way out.

In a message to the fleet earlier this month, the Navy Department’s CIO told local commands they need to begin transitioning their users to other devices as quickly as possible as the service’s relationship with the Canadian-based company nears its end of life while also offering sample contract language for wireless carrier agreements. Like most of the rest of the world, the Navy is transitioning to Android and Apple-based smartphones and tablets, although the Apple products are the only new devices authorized for now.

To handle security, the Navy is using software containers designed by Good Technology. Installed on each phone, they’ll store government information and applications inside a secure, segregated partition of the device, and users will be able to handle personal information, email and apps on the same device outside the virtual container. The devices won’t make use of DoD’s common access cards for PKI authentication, but Navy policy mandates that Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint feature be enabled for two-factor authentication along with passwords of at least eight characters to get into the secure container.

Navy officials say they’ve rigged their Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) with enough capacity to handle 15,000 Apple and Android devices for now and expect to expand that to 30,000 by this summer, enough to handle the service’s current population of BlackBerry users.

Apple’s iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones and the iPad Air and iPad Air 2 are authorized on NMCI as of now; the Navy says it plans to add support for various Android devices later this year.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.