■ It’s BlackBerry vs. Palo Alto Networks in a duel for cybersecurity supremacy in this week’s The Faceoff.

It’s hard to imagine that there was once a point in time when BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market. In an industry that is ever-evolving, it seems like eons ago that BlackBerry’s hand-held devices were as ubiquitous for executives as they were for teens.

When John Chen took the helm of BlackBerry in 2013, there was a lot of uncertainty. Chen diverted attention and resources away from handheld to cybersecurity.

Chen’s efforts to change BlackBerry’s focus were successful and, according to its first-quarter 2022 results, $107 million (U.S.) of $174 million in revenue came from its cybersecurity division. Overall revenue is down from $206 million in 2020, but the net loss improved to $62 million this quarter compared with $636 million the prior year.

“Before the pandemic we would have seen people bringing their own mobile phone devices and connecting that to corporate email and networks, but now with work-fromhome, we have corporate devices on home networks. The number of end points that need to be secured have grown and it is a challenge for (IT administrators) to defend that large attack surface,” said Douglas Stebila, an associate professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo.

In terms of cybersecurity trends, Stebila notes that “over the past decade, we are seeing a move from the paradigm of perimeter security to zero trust. In the past you would try to build a thick wall around your systems and hope that no one got through the wall. What we are seeing now is that you (design your systems assuming) that attackers are likely to be inside your network (already).”

As for the competitiveness of Canadian cybersecurity companies, Stebila acknowledges that “we certainly have some good Canadian firms competing on the international stage” but we are not “as competitive as we would like to be.”