Canadian-based Research in Motion (RIM) had an outage of service Monday, October 10th. A switch malfunctioned as a data center in Slough, England. Subsequently, a back up failed to operate properly. The effect was to release a massive reservoir of data which jammed up other data centers, spreading the disruption through the network.
Alone, Research in Motion compresses and encrypts data in its own system before pushing it to BlackBerry devices through carrier networks. All competitors rely on carrier networks to handle both routing and delivery of content. The RIM approach has a design that is inherently more secure, but its complexity allows for glitches such as the major service interruption this week.
It is likely that RIM needs to expand its data storage capacity.
The co-chief executive officers of RIM, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, made a joint appearance at a Thursday news conference apologizing for the inability to fix the problem quickly. RIM did not indicate whether customers would be compensated for the interruption.
RIM has a faltering market share in the U.S. that has not to date been reflected in overseas markets. The company released some touchphone products in August as a holding measure in preparation for a new line of BlackBerry smartphones using the software of its PlayBook tablet product. This transition is considered critical to RIM’s turnaround efforts. With market share down, the stock has deteriorated from $70 a share to the low 20s.
Redacted and simplified from http://news.yahoo.com/rim-scrambles-end-global-blackberry-outage-003216780.html
The transmission of data by RIM is more complex but more secure than competitors. This RIM architecture is related to the system going down for three days this week.
A problem is that RIM has a structure that provides better security to the handheld device owner. Inherently, the U.S. government would prefer unencrypted data (that it could intercept and analyze) at the risk of loss of privacy and hacking, because of government’s inherent desire to snoop (frequently disguised as a ‘need’ for ‘national security' magically more important than the Bill of Rights.)
If the government genuinely desired maximum security, then the more complex structure of RIM, in which encryption is performed before a message is carried, would become the standard. Thus, ultimately, RIM is right if –but only if – it can make its architecture supremely reliable and therefore competitive. ‘Rooting’ for RIM makes sense, since, ultimately, all traffic is going to have to be encrypted securely.
Alone, Research in Motion compresses and encrypts data in its own system before pushing it to BlackBerry devices through carrier networks. All competitors rely on carrier networks to handle both routing and delivery of content. The RIM approach has a design that is inherently more secure, but its complexity allows for glitches such as the major service interruption this week.
It is likely that RIM needs to expand its data storage capacity.
The co-chief executive officers of RIM, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, made a joint appearance at a Thursday news conference apologizing for the inability to fix the problem quickly. RIM did not indicate whether customers would be compensated for the interruption.
RIM has a faltering market share in the U.S. that has not to date been reflected in overseas markets. The company released some touchphone products in August as a holding measure in preparation for a new line of BlackBerry smartphones using the software of its PlayBook tablet product. This transition is considered critical to RIM’s turnaround efforts. With market share down, the stock has deteriorated from $70 a share to the low 20s.
Redacted and simplified from http://news.yahoo.com/rim-scrambles-end-global-blackberry-outage-003216780.html
Blog Author’s Comment
The transmission of data by RIM is more complex but more secure than competitors. This RIM architecture is related to the system going down for three days this week.
A problem is that RIM has a structure that provides better security to the handheld device owner. Inherently, the U.S. government would prefer unencrypted data (that it could intercept and analyze) at the risk of loss of privacy and hacking, because of government’s inherent desire to snoop (frequently disguised as a ‘need’ for ‘national security' magically more important than the Bill of Rights.)
If the government genuinely desired maximum security, then the more complex structure of RIM, in which encryption is performed before a message is carried, would become the standard. Thus, ultimately, RIM is right if –but only if – it can make its architecture supremely reliable and therefore competitive. ‘Rooting’ for RIM makes sense, since, ultimately, all traffic is going to have to be encrypted securely.
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