14 DAY TRIAL // New United Arab Emirates (UAE) telecom guidelines will prevent companies with less than 20 BlackBerry users from operating private BlackBery Enterprise Servers (BES).
The move comes as BlackBerry communications are increasingly seen as a national security problem for governments used to monitor their citizens.
BlackBerry has long been considered the most secure and business-friendly mobile handset because of its strong default encryption for email and text messaging.
However, this has also been a problem for Research In Motion, which had to make compromises in order to satisfy the national security demands of governments in Middle East and elsewhere.
Last year, the UAE Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) issued an order to telecom providers to suspend BlackBerry Internet services in the country starting with October 11 if national security agencies are not given surveillance capabilities over the communications.
The decision came after a year earlier, Etisalat, the country's largest mobile carrier was caught pushing scareware to BlackBerry users hidden as a software update.
RIM eventually reached an agreement with the UAE government and avoided the nation-wide ban, but it couldn't solve one problem, the privately run BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES).
BES allows companies to integrate BlackBerry services within their existent networks and provide their employees with private and secure communication capabilities.
Unlike BlackBerry Internet Services where the encryption is achieved on RIM's own servers, with BES only the private companies have the encryption keys.
Because of this, UAE authorities will enforce more control over who can run BES. "Enterprise services are to be made available to qualifying organisations only and not to private individuals. "Qualifying organisations must have a valid UAE trade licence and a minimum of 20 or more Enterprise accounts under the company ownership," TRA said, according to The National.
The new regulation will come into effect on May 1 and Etisalat is already informing its customers about the change. Companies with fewer than 20 accounts will have to switch to RIM-managed BlackBerry Internet Services.