Google is offering a new backup plan for businesses worried about Microsoft Exchange downtime. On Thursday, the company announced Google Message Continuity, which can “help you ensure that your users never lose access to e-mail” during an Exchange outage.
On-premises Exchange accounts are synchronized with the Google cloud, and the backup service gives users access to e-mail inboxes that are always up to date and available through the Gmail interface even when the on-site servers are down. When Exchange is back up, current messages, deletions, folder assignments, and other updates recorded by the Continuity service update Exchange.
‘A Smooth Bridge’
The cost is $25 per user per year for new customers, or $13 per user per year for current customers of Postini, a company that Google acquired in 2007.
The backup service is intended to do more than simply offer a mirrored e-mail account. Google said Message Continuity customers get “a smooth bridge” to the Google cloud, where they can experience Google’s Gmail, Contacts and Calendar without disruption to the current e-mail service. And if the company decides to deploy Google Apps, e-mail won’t need to be migrated, since it would already be in sync.
On its Google Enterprise blog, the company said all incoming e-mail is first filtered through Postini for spam and viruses, and then sent to the Gmail and Exchange servers. During normal usage, a user interacts with an account on Exchange. Any changes to that account are reflected through Google Sync Server, which updates the corresponding Gmail account.
Each Gmail account stores 25GB in the cloud, and includes the security features of Google Message Security, such as antivirus and antispam detection, content policies, and encryption. No hardware installation is required for Message Continuity, and everything is available through a web interface.
Microsoft has an Exchange Hosted Archiving service, which…