Mountain View, California — Alluring to large organizations and enterprise customers burdened by federal rules requires that electronic message such as e-mail be archived, securely and reliably for litigation or other legal issues. Google is extending its hosted e-mail archiving service called “Google Message Discovery,” to hold messages for up to a decade, the company said Wednesday. The cost: $45 per user per year.
The service will function with a company’s existing e-mail infrastructure and has no storage limit.
Protective email storing and retention has become much more imperative in recent years, largely due to government regulations and guidelines. For instance, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure legally demands IT organizations to properly retain business email messages to enable reliable access for legal discovery.
Google Message Discovery, service that already allows users search archived e-mail, debuted in April and supports Microsoft’s Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Domino e-mail systems, retention for one year and research for any particular message from the archive for a fee of US$25 per user per year, which includes Google’s Postini anti-spam and antivirus filtering.
Enterprise customers who opted for the 10-year option will have to pay $45 per user account per year. That may sound expensive, especially as far as large organizations are concerned, but Google claims that its offer is a bargain: “When the total cost of an on-premise security and archiving solution is taken into account, keeping email over the course of seven years can cost more than $200 per user per year,” Bill Kee of product marketing wrote in an entry Wednesday on the Official Google Enterprise blog.
“Google Message Discovery” is also available to buyers of an online suite of hosted cloud services that include business email, information sharing and security features called Google Apps for Enterprise.
Kee, writing in the official Google blog, said: “Coupled with the growing importance of email as a store of intellectual property, email archiving has become both legally necessary and critical to the operation of your business.”
In the U.K, under the new plans Google will now hold email for up to 10 years for £22.50, with one year of archiving costing £12.50 (US$21.50).
Google has been offering Google Message Discovery service since April and boosted the offering when it acquired Postini in July 2007 for $625 million. Postini claims that it has more than 35,000 business customers and more than 10 million users worldwide.
Google’s Postini service holds the second-largest market share for hosted security services behind competitor MessageLabs, which Symantec announced Wednesday it plans to buy for US$695 million.
MessageLabs holds one third of the market.