BlackBerry rolls out AtHoc crisis communications system to European datacentres

Blackberry has confirmed local hosting arrangements are now in place for European users of its AtHoc crisis communication offering, with instances now deployed in datacentres in the UK, Netherlands and France.

The deployment comes ahead of the introduction of a new European Union-based European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) directive, which states all EU member states must have an established public warning system in place to alert systems by 2022.

The AtHoc system is used by companies to aid communication between employees during times of national emergency, including natural disasters, extreme weather events and terrorists attacks, by enabling two-communication to be maintained across the organisation to any device. 

During BlackBerry’s first-quarter financial results, which coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, AtHoc was hailed a “performance leader” for the company, as organisations increasingly looked to deploy the technology for business continuity and preparedness reasons.

As detailed in the results, the company secured deals for AtHoc with a number of first responder organisations and energy companies, as well as with the United States Department of Transportation and the US Federal Trade Commission.

Speaking at the time of the results publication in June 2020, BlackBerry CEO John Chen talked up how the strength and size of the install-base for AtHoc in the US and the Five Eyes countries, which includes the UK.

By offering up locally hosted and regulatory compliant instances of the service to European organisations, that could pave the way for greater adoption of AtHoc across the continent too, ahead of the EECC directive coming into play.

According to Blackberry, hosting AtHoc in these additional datacentres will also bring latency benefits by ensuring the emergency communications it delivers sent and received in a timely manner, while also ensuring compliance the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

“Empowering our customers with the most secure communication platform for increasing resiliency and communicating swiftly is critical in a crisis,” said Adam Enterkin, senior vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at BlackBerry.

“It is also vital that we are able to adhere to new and existing EU data residency requirements per the GDPR. With BlackBerry AtHoc’s new EU-based datacentres we are able to scale our infrastructure to better support our customers’ needs over a secure and reliable network.”