Credit: Dreamstime
Singapore Muslim Women's Association (Persatuan Pemudi Islam Singapura - PPIS) has deployed BlackBerry Protect to secure endpoints across 16 centres in Singapore, delivered in partnership with value-added distributor ACE Pacific.
The move was motivated by a desire to safeguard the delivery of “trusted community services” during Covid-19, with ACE Pacific engaged to roll-out a new anti-virus solution designed to enhance malware protection and reduce the “administrative burden” of managing signature updates.
Operating as a non-profit social welfare organisation, PPIS has continued to support Muslim women of all ages across the city-state during the pandemic, despite circuit breaker measures creating additional societal challenges. During this period, the 16 centres across the island have remained open, with social workers, counsellors and teachers offering a range of family and children services.
To ensure the ongoing provision of services - alongside the confidentiality of client data - PPIS embarked on plans to enhance cyber security capabilities following a series of phishing attacks in 2019, which demonstrated that existing legacy software was “no longer effective”.
“We needed to streamline endpoint management so we could focus on projects that help PPIS meet its strategic goals for digital transformation,” said Thariq Aziz Abdul Hamid, IT manager at PPIS. “In every respect, I found BlackBerry Protect to be a perfect fit.
“BlackBerry Protect is performing exactly as we’d hoped, and we’re planning to add BlackBerry Optics for endpoint detection and response to our security stack in the near future. Our endpoints are secure, our users are happy, and we have time to work on new projects.”
From a technology standpoint, BlackBerry Protect leverages artificial intelligence to "predict and prevent" the execution of ransomware and zero-day threats, removing the need for endpoint management processes. The offering also allows extended visibility of the network to detect attacks and potential vulnerabilities across all endpoints, users and data from a centralised dashboard.
“We’re always surveying the market for security solutions that are operationally sound and technically sophisticated,” said Mark Ang, regional managing director of ACE. “After conducting extensive tests and confirming its capabilities for proactive prevention, we deployed BlackBerry Protect at every ACE location.
“The implementation was simple and straightforward, so we felt confident recommending BlackBerry Protect to PPIS. We’re looking forward to offering our customers a complete unified endpoint security solution following the recent release of BlackBerry Spark Suites.”
Delving deeper, the solution also has a “pre-execution predictive advantage” to prevent advanced threats, including zero-day attacks, approximately 1000 days before they are first detected.
“BlackBerry strongly believes in giving back to the communities in which we operate,” said Stephen Mak, vice president of Asia Pacific at BlackBerry Spark. “Together with ACE, we are proud to have helped PPIS move successfully from a traditional anti-virus model to an AI-driven, preventative approach to threat management - ensuring the organisation is able to control the chaos of today’s complex cyber security environment and focus on their important work.”
