India will not ban BlackBerrys

Rest easy, boys and girls – India will not be banning on BlackBerry use anytime soon, according to its internal security chief. This is also good news for RIM as they will certainly want a slice of the pie in the world’s fastest growing cell phone market. Despite Internal Security Chief U.K. Bansal reporting that national security concerns have been raised with RIM over the data services, a solution is bound to be on the way in due time. We’re interested to know just what kind of compromise RIM will come up with in order to continue selling their smartphones in India.

Source: Ubergizmo

Why are Governments worried?

RIM’s devices give governments greater cause for concern than other smartphones because of their data encryption. “Governments are concerned that the BlackBerry service does not allow them to monitor data traffic sent and received by BlackBerry users, and that this data is handled and stored offshore out of government control,” explained Ovum analyst Tim Renowden.
So the problem isn’t the device, but RIM’s data centres, which it calls Network Operations Centres. “All data sent and received by BlackBerry devices passes through these NOCs and is compressed and encrypted,” explained Renowden.

Such security is a major selling point to businesses, he noted. “This architecture has been an especially strong selling point for enterprise users (and some governments), who demand strong security.”

“However, some governments are uncomfortable with the solution because they have no visibility into BlackBerry data traffic, and are concerned that it may be used for criminal purposes,” he said.

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