Thread: Google Expands E-Mail Archiving

THESE DAYS, the story of a business's activities and its intellectual property is often told in e-mail messages to and from its customers, vendors, and partners. More and more often, if your busi¬ness becomes involved in a regulatory or legal action, much of the discovery process can focus on the hardware and software you use to archive your e-mail communications.

Acknowledging this, and the fact that securing and archiving e-mail is typically an expensive IT line item for small businesses, Google has extended its hosted e-mail archiving service to hold e-mail messages for up to a decade, securing them with its Postini antis pam and antivirus filtering software.




The archiving service, called Google Message Discovery, per user per year if you want to store your e-mail in one of Google's massive server farms for up to ten years. Google says its service can archive e-mail from Microsoft's Exchange and IBM's Lotus Domino e-mail systems, among others. The e-mail travels to Google's archiving service via your e-mail system's journaling feature.

E-MaiL Search Options The service also provides a search interface for quickly locating relevant messages in the event your company is asked to provide them, Google says. Once the right ones are found, you can view them through your regular e-mail interface (Outlook Express, for example), or output them to a secure ITP server for sharing with outside legal counsel.

Google claims that while the need for secure, long¬term e-mail archiving is growing, many businesses are confused about how to do it, and so do nothing. "Regulations and guidelines like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (in the US) put pressure on IT organizations to ensure that email is properly retained and can be reliably located and preserved in the event of legal discovery," writes Google product manager Bill Kee at Google's Enterprise blog. "Coupled with the growing importance of email as a store of intellectual property, en:ail archiving has become, both legally necessary and critical to ... your business." Google says companies routinely spend per user per year to secure and archive e-mail.