Case Study

Why BlackBerry Workspaces
Was the Perfect Investment
For This Global Financial
Services Firm

At a Glance
Industry Financial Services
Employees 800
Location Brisbane, Australia
Products BlackBerry®
Workspaces
www.qic.com

QIC routinely works with highly sensitive data, and keeping this data secure iscritical. An expanding global presence represented a significant challenge for theorganization in this regard – a challenge it met through BlackBerry® Workspaces.

1The Organization
QIC is a global diversified alternative investment firm offering infrastructure, realestate, private capital, liquid strategies and multi-asset investments. It is one ofthe largest institutional investment managers in Australia serving governments,pension plans, sovereign wealth funds and insurers, across Australia, Europe,Asia, the Middle East and the US. Headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, QIC has
offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, London, Sydney
and Melbourne. “Originally, we were very much an Australian-based business,”
explains Grant Slender, Information Technology, Security, and Risk Leader atQIC. “Today, however, the organization operates in an environment thatis truly global.”

The Challenge
Faced with the security concerns of the financial services industry, global
expansion can be difficult. IT systems and security tactics that work for a local
firm become insufficient as a company expands into new markets. This was theproblem facing QIC as it grew into new regions like the US.
“We quickly realized that we needed IT delivery that reflected our growing global
presence,” says Slender. “So, two years ago, a transformation strategy was puton the table. We planned to proceed down a cloud path, migrating all of ourtechnology services into three regions globally while taking advantage ofcontemporary services like Microsoft® Office 365®.”
File sharing was at the core of this transition. Many of QIC’s employees work
flexibly and travel frequently, meeting with clients, potential investors and thirdparties. An increasingly mobile workforce and greater client and stakeholder
engagement often requires close collaboration between multiple individuals,
and the frequent exchange of files, some of which contain highly sensitive
information.
The breadth and scope of this collaboration meant that highly sensitive data
might potentially be shared through insecure channels. QIC sought to address
this issue whilst also providing its employees with a better, more securemeans of collaboration. In so doing, it sought a solution that worked seamlessly
with existing cloud investments like Office 365, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
Enter BlackBerry Workspaces.
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The Solution
Workspaces proved to be exactly what QIC was looking for. Easy to use for
employees, it provided the firm’s IT department with complete control over
all its files – and total visibility into how, where, and when those files wereaccessed or modified. Its close integration with Microsoft’s cloud platform
also aligned perfectly with the firm’s strategy.
“Workspaces provides us with an independent and auditable way to manage
the collaboration of documents and information with third parties, whether
they be internal or external,” explains Slender. “It also met our cloud objectives– the spirit of being able to flexibly collaborate with others. We found wecouldn’t get to the level of sophistication we required with other cloudproducts.”
After deciding to use the BlackBerry Workspaces solution, Slender and his
team spent some time working with BlackBerry to define specific needs anduse cases. By talking with some of BlackBerry’s key product management
teams, QIC ensured it received exactly the functionality it required. The
process, says Slender, was both quick and seamless.
“It was important to communicate and bring together the resources weneeded to get the message out about BlackBerry Workspaces to ouremployees,” he explains. “We really invested our focus and time on providing
information about Workspaces. Shaping understanding around a newconcept – how to use it, how to manage data, and so on.”The Results
With BlackBerry Workspaces in place, QIC can support not just file sharing,but several advanced collaboration use cases, such as a digital ‘deal room’for investment negotiations. It has a secure sharing platform that operates
seamlessly with Office 365, one which helped prevent data leakage during
the firm’s transition to Windows 10. More importantly, it has a secure cloud
platform that’s easy to use for both the end user and IT.
Since deploying Workspaces, QIC has enjoyed many benefits.

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“BlackBerryWorkspaces
provided us with anindependent andauditable way tomanage document
collaboration andinformation bothinternally andexternally.
With BlackBerryWorkspaces, we’reraising the bar anddelivering a solutionthat improves
everything foreveryone.”
Grant Slender,
Information Technology,
Security and Risk Leader
at QIC

Centralized Collaboration, Improved Control: Before QIC started using
BlackBerry Workspaces, its workers routinely shared data across multiple
platforms and through multiple mediums – smartphones, laptops, tablets,
and thumb drives, to name a few. In addition tomaking collaboration far more complicated than it needed to be, this also
made it difficult for QIC to keep track of its data.
“We realized that there were people collaborating with sensitive information
in some very insecure ways,” says Slender. “Sharing files on Drobox, copying
them to multiple devices, sharing them through USB keys, and so on. It wasimpossible to know where everything was – and far too easy for sensitive
information to potentially go missing.”
With Workspaces, all of QIC’s data is stored in a central location, accessible
from any authorized device, and IT has total control over what can bedone with QIC’s data. QIC can securely distribute, edit, and track privileged
information with both internal end external stakeholders.
Regulatory Compliance: Because Workspaces features comprehensive
logging and reporting functionality, it’s allowed QIC more visibility into how
its data is being accessed and used – and by whom. At a moment’s notice,
Slender and his team can determine where any file is located, who has accessto it, and how it’s been modified. And that, says Slender, is invaluable from acompliance perspective.
“When you have a breach, the first thing you need to do is decide whether
it’s reportable,” says Slender. “If you don’t have auditing capabilities or anunderstanding of where your data resides, under regulations like the General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) you have to assume everything wascompromised. You’re not given the option of simply saying you don’t know.”“The clock starts ticking the moment you become aware of a cyber incident –you have days to decide whether to report it to regulators, and you need time
to define and document what happened,” he continues. “Being able to quickly
identify what is and isn’t breached is extremely important in this scenario –as is being able to track the flow of your business’s data.”

4Widespread Acceptance from Clients and Partners: Because of the easeof sharing through Workspaces, clients and partners have been warm andsupportive of the platform as well.
“We’ve had a few cases where we had to work very closely with technology
teams, but most third parties have been willing participants in using
BlackBerry Workspaces,” says Slender. “We have had some engaged
conversations with IT security teams or management. Even then, they’ve been
supportive of the fact that we’re raising the bar, and delivering a solution that
improves everything for everyone.”
Improved Trust: Trust is one of the most important commodities ininvestment management, difficult to gain and easy to lose. Workspaces
ensures that QIC has clear, demonstrable file security in place. More
importantly, it also has built-in
business continuity – protection against both hardware failure and cyberattacks like ransomware.
Both are extremely important to its clients.
“We take the protection of client data very seriously,” says Slender. “We wantto demonstrate and be able to uphold a very strong focus on managing risks– because if we’re breached, the reputational damage could lose us millions.
Not just one client, but several.”Grant Slender,
Information Technology,
Security and Risk Leader at QIC

Future Plans: Moving forward, QIC ultimately wants to retire its traditional
security tools in favor of an approach entirely geared towards mobility.
Traditional, perimeter-focused IT security is no longer enough in such anenvironment. The industry
has changed, however – and Slender sees QIC changing with it.
“We’ve transitioned to a world where information is now disseminatedbroadly, and there is no definable perimeter,” says Slender. “I see QIC
evolving to embed information security decisions within the data itself – andBlackBerry Workspaces is helping us on that journey. Ultimately, we’ll remove
a lot of the perimeter-based controls further, and embed the control capacity
within files and applications.”

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“Historically for QIC, information security resided around a protect theperimeter type approach, where we applied all our controls on the edge of ourenvironment and managed information within it,” explains Slender. “We havestrong and strict control over the types of devices our employees use in theworkplace, and we ultimately want to loosen that control – to be less devicefocused, and more focused on applications and data.”
In addition to transitioning to perimeter-less security, QIC also wants to makeits security as seamless as possible. The end goal is to integrate Workspaces
with OneDrive, Office 365, and SharePoint Online to such an extent thatthe firm’s workers don’t even realize the product is there.

6About BlackBerry Limited
BlackBerry Limited is an enterprise software and services company focused on
securing and managing IoT endpoints. The company does this with BlackBerry®
Secure™, an end-to-end Enterprise of Things platform, comprised of its enterprisecommunication and collaboration software and safety-certified embeddedsolutions.
Based in Waterloo, Ontario, BlackBerry Limited was founded in 1984 and operates
in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
The Company trades under the ticker symbol “BB” on the Toronto Stock Exchange
and the New York Stock Exchange. For more information visit BlackBerry.com,and follow the company on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

(C) 2018 BlackBerry Limited. Trademarks, including but not limited to BLACKBERRY, BBM, EMBLEM
Design and ATHOC are the trademarks or registered trademarks of BlackBerry Limited, its subsidiaries
and/or affiliates, used under license, and the exclusive rights to such trademarks are expressly reserved.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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