Security Pilot for Blackberry Devices

By Sandra Saunders, OIT

In an effort to make our mobile devices more secure, a month long pilot was set into motion on April 7 th to implement a policy on the Blackberry Enterprise Server. The policy required all 40 Office of Information Technology (OIT) Blackberry pilot users to set an eight character, non-complex password on their device. The timeout period, or period of inactivity, was set to 30 minutes. During the thirty days, the users were asked to report back on their experience of having to enter a password under these restrictions.

Users found it difficult and inconvenient to have to enter their password on such a frequent basis during their work day. The results of this round of pilot testing led to further experimentation requiring only a five character password and allowing an inactivity period of one hour.

This pilot continues and the results will be discussed at the next OIT Leadership Team meeting.