In April 2010, Mimecast released a report entitled “Keeping the Enterprise Agile and Mobile” in which we examined the growing pressure to keep BlackBerry services up and running at all times.
At the time, we thought the results were pretty interesting and events over the past few days have played them out pretty well.
Our report found that the expectations of BlackBerry users are extremely high – 66% of respondents claimed that as much as one hour of downtime per month is not acceptable and a further 22% saying NO downtime is acceptable at all! I can only imagine how these users feel about the last three days’ worth of interruptions…
With the reported impact on support desks and the board level fall out that BlackBerry outages seem to cause, we were, at the time, surprised by the high percentages of organizations that had no provisions for high availability (41%) in place at all. A further 59% said they couldn’t provide continuity for their users and 61% don’t have an internal BlackBerry availability SLA.
So with these numbers, the corporate world breathed a collective sigh of relief when RIM announced that the outages that they have been having are only affecting their BIS and BBM users… Well, they sighed until their corporate users started complaining about service unavailability.
The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), the body responsible for the management of telecommunications and information technology industries within the United Arab Emirates is threatening to block critical functionality of Research In Motion’s popular BlackBerry messaging devices.
