Hosted apps war heats up: Google adds security to Google Apps

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 October 2007 07:43

Business IT - Technology

Google has added Postini's email security and compliance services to Google Apps Premier Edition, after paying $US625 million last month for Postini.

"With Postini, we saw the potential to deliver a more complete hosted solution for businesses of all sizes," said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise. There is also the looming competition from Microsoft, which last week announced its own range of hosted applications: with separate offerings for the consumer/individual professional and for large enterprises.

With its enterprise offering Microsoft's emphasis is on "the ability to control access to data, manage users, apply business and compliance policy, and meet high availability standards...enhanced security, management features and service-level capabilities to support mission-critical applications and systems."

Which all sounds similar to the enhancements Google has just announced. Google's new security, compliance, policy management, and message recovery services give customers the ability to:

- Set configurable spam and virus filtering that are customised for the nature of the business, complementing the spam and virus filters already included in Google Apps.
- Centrally manage all outbound content policy, including adding footers to every message based on business policy rules, blocking messages with specific keywords or attachments, and preventing emails with sensitive company information from being sent.
- Create, manage, and report on policies that apply to user groups or individual users.
- Give administrators the option of visibility into all email within their organisation for the purposes of compliance.
- Restore messages inadvertently deleted in the last 90 days.