All About Blackberry's AtHoc Crisis Communication Platform

BLACKBERRY’S ATHOC CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM SUPPORTS INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS

Expanded cloud offering empowers European organizations to improve public safety with secure crisis communications in a fully‐compliant, EU‐hosted deployment

BlackBerry Limited (NASDAQ: BBRY; TSX: BB), a global leader in secure mobile communications, announced the availability of BlackBerry’s AtHoc hosted networked crisis communications platform from BlackBerry’s secure data centers in Europe. The new offering will serve European and global customers that plan to support public safety leveraging the BlackBerry AtHoc cloud, which enables people and organizations to exchange critical information in real time during business continuity and life safety operations. In light of recent events, security communication is of paramount importance to both public safety agencies and commercial organizations concerned with the safety of their personnel and community.

With the option to be hosted in Europe, BlackBerry’s AtHoc delivers an offering that is not only in full compliance with regional security but also supports data privacy concerns, including the recent European Court of Justice determination in October, 2015 that a U.S.‐EU Safe Harbor Framework is no longer valid for the transfer of personally identifiable information (PII) from Europe to the U.S.

“AtHoc’s expanded, secure European hosting capabilities offers high reliability and security with a cloud deployment,” said Guy Miasnik, President of BlackBerry’s AtHoc Division. “The solution is in full compliance with European data protection requirements to ensure the world’s most demanding organizations can deliver security, life safety, and business continuity to their community and personnel.”

AtHoc Networked Crisis communications platform enables immediate and effective communication within and across organizations both remotely and on‐site in the case of an incident. AtHoc’s mass notification solution delivers targeted alerts in real time, using multiple channels to potentially thousands of enterprise staff or personnel. AtHoc customers securely connect with a diverse set of endpoints, including mobile devices running iOS and Android, PC and Mac desktops, digital displays, radios, IP phones, sirens, fire panels and speakers to facilitate collaboration and enhance situational awareness.

Featuring world‐class security and high availability, the European data centers will host data for public and private sector companies in Europe. Customer data will be processed within Europe, meeting the requirements for how European organizations handle PII and data privacy. A primary disaster recovery data center in Europe will supplement the new offering.

"We’re committed to working closely with our growing number of European customers to provide them with the secure crisis communications technology they need to communicate and collaborate rapidly in times of crisis,” said Florian Bienvenu, Senior Vice President, EMEA Enterprise Sales at BlackBerry.

With the availability of the European data center, BlackBerry’s AtHoc offers hosting solutions for organizations around the world. In addition to Europe, the BlackBerry AtHoc cloud is available from the company’s secure U.S. data centers, and has been available from BlackBerry’s secure data center in Canada since February, 2016.

For more information, visit www.BlackBerry.com or www.athoc.com

Review of CMAD by Cath Jenkin

Being a community manager can sometimes feel like a lonely job. When you’re dealing with client queries, feedback requirements, complaints, compliments and trying to get that beloved escalation matrix well, escalating…some days can feel like a train ride with no tracks.

But then along comes the 24-hour CMAD celebrations and the webcasts we participated in, and that reminds all of us that, despite feeling lonely some days, we’re actually on the steam train together.

Perhaps the best part of participating in the webcast with Nazareen Ebrahim, Kirsty Bisset, Samantha Perry and Fred Felton (link-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O9S_4ZUn5A&index=1&list=LLKnh-tz4OO6JLP5A6llKL3w) was the reminders that we’ve all got our tickets for this train ride and, so often, the challenges faced by us in our daily work, are faced by all of us, across the globe.

As we discussed the definitions and strategies for coping with a social media crisis, it’s evident that the importance of a crisis communications strategy is unparalleled. As Kirsty Bisset said, it’s important to go through the “What ifs” before they happen, so that internal response and action plans are well coordinated long before a crisis hits. As Samantha Perry pointed out too, within a crisis situation, it’s important that the right people are vested with the ability to speak on behalf of a company or brand and the importance of having a CEO or company leader come to the fore in times of crisis is a reassuring mechanism that helps to calm a client panic or outrage. Nazareen Ebrahim related a few poignant examples of how this has come into play, citing Tony Fernandez’ online responses when the AirAsia aeroplane went down in late 2014.

I’m certain that lessons learnt and shared during our session were well received and, judging by the tweets we read and online comments, it’s great to know that our webcast proved useful for Community Managers out there! Thanks to MyCommunityManager for having us!

Cath Jenkin
@cathjenkin