BlackBerry's David Nicol and Sliced Tech's Jason McClure.
Managed services provider Sliced Tech has partnered with BlackBerry to host its secure communications portfolio, SecuSuite for Government.
The solution will be available to all levels of Australian government agencies and enterprises to secure their mobile communications with SecuSuite meeting security certification requirements and, now, with the Sliced Tech partnership, it addresses data sovereignty concerns.
BlackBerry Asia Pacific and Japan managing director IoT Solutions David Nicol said the company was looking for a partner to not only host, but also provide a service for SecuSuite.
“We were looking for a partner that could host that in Australia and is focused on government,” he said. “The Sliced Tech team have a great reputation around security and have a significant presence in the government sector. They also have an ecosystem of other partners they work with to take the joint BlackBerry and Sliced Tech solution to market.”
BlackBerry’s hosted BlackBerry SecuSuite Service will be provided at a fixed cost and will also be available to IT service providers to offer as part of a broader suite of managed services.
Sliced Tech CEO Jason McClure added it can now fill a gap within its offering to the market in the collaboration space with secure messaging and voice capabilities.
“We had secure file sharing, secure email and secure SharePoint etc, but we didn’t have that secure messaging capability. This complements a lot of the other things that we’re currently doing,” he said.
McClure said it had already begun working on ‘proof of concept’ projects with potential customers and it was augmenting the support for the product in ensuring sovereignty, which was an important factor.
“BlackBerry's extensive experience providing secure communications solutions to governments globally, combined with our locally hosted, secure government community cloud services, give us confidence in the strength of our joint sensitive communication offering,” he said. “We didn’t want to deal with a product that we couldn’t support on-shore with our staff that have government security clearances.
“As geopolitical tensions continue to rise, our customers are looking for solutions that minimise cyber risk and address their data sovereignty concerns.”
McClure added as a SaaS offering some customers also needed assurance they could manage their ‘own tenancy’ if required.
“We’re able to supply the capability as a platform where the customer doesn’t have to worry about how the application works, but they can still control their own settings, configurations and their outcomes from using the product,” he said.
Additionally, McClure said Sliced Tech was constantly growing as a company and expanding into new capabilities such as offering multi-cloud strategies.
“We’ve got a national footprint in data centre capability and coverage, which is part of the attraction in BlackBerry because we can deliver to the broad customer base,” he said. “We’ve focused the business on enablement and identifying niche capabilities that really add a lot of value and SecuSuite is one of them.”
