Plan for BlackBerry outages

Research In Motion (RIM) — the makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry email devices — revolutionised the email industry. With their portable units, people could send and receive mail from anywhere they could get a signal, quickly and easily. It has been said that nothing shakes the foundations of a society like when something we all take for granted stops working, and a potential legal action could create just such a situation for our digital society and its communications.

RIM is currently being sued in the US for patent violations by NTP, a brain-trust that holds the patents on several technologies for the transmission of email via mobile devices. Basically NTP claims that BlackBerry and its related services and service providers are using technology originally envisioned by NTP patent holders, and therefore RIM must either pay up for back royalties and licensing fees, or else shut down their service. This would mean literally hundreds of thousands of US users of Blackberry devices would be left with paperweights instead of email devices as the radio network and server systems shut down in the wake of the result of the legal action, if NTP wins.

Now, it's unlikely that NTP will get a complete and full injunction against RIM, at least not unless/until they win the lawsuits. The reason for this is simple, the very Justice Department that would enforce such a ruling is also a major user of the BlackBerry services, and they would be very hard pressed to shut down their own systems. However, what would happen if they did?

How many people in your organisation are reliant on using these devices in the US to perform their day-to-day activities? How many need BlackBerry devices to stay competitive, to close deals, to keep your business ahead of others? Also, this case could have deep repercussions for other wireless email services, so what happens if a ripple effect strikes the industry in general?

First off, be ready for the possibility of loss of service for those members of your company in the US. Get all users to understand that this is a potential issue, even if the chances of actual service loss are slim. This will at least soften the blow if the system does go offline at some point. Also, keep in mind that there are alternatives to BlackBerry. Microsoft has mobile email services for Exchange 2003 Server editions. Goodlink has a competing service to RIM, offering both services and enterprise-level server systems. Both of these have various mobile devices they will and will not work with, so keep in mind that if you swap over it will almost definitely require new equipment.

Remember that most email systems can be accessed remotely via laptops and Web browsers. It's nowhere near as convenient as the BlackBerry, but it will allow users to get to their mail when not at the office. You probably already have everything you need to implement this service already, so it is something you can offer without buying new hardware and units for the whole sales crew.

While the chances of RIM going offline are slim, they are real, and you should be taking a serious look at how your organisation will react if it happens. The Gartner analyst firm is recommending that new mission-critical BlackBerry deployments be put on hold, and as if RIM didn't have enough problems, a new threat aimed at BlackBerry devices has just been discovered — one that could result in disabling a user's ability to view attachments. The bottom line is that disasters come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes the loss of a depended-upon service can be as big a disaster as any other data system failure.