Postini provides secure electronic communications for email, instant messaging, and the web. As recently as February this year, Google Apps Premier Edition had attracted the support of Postini to integrate its offering with Google’s new hosted applications offering for enterprises.
Google Apps Premier Edition is Google’s attack on Microsoft’s desktop applications monopoly, and brings together the company’s email, calendaring, instant messaging, and voice over IP (VoIP) applications with its word-processing and spreadsheet functionality and email for mobile devices.
According to Google, the on-demand Apps service is used by 100,000 businesses and the take-up is reportedly around 1,000 small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) per day. However, the adoption rate among large enterprises is slower due to the ‘traditional’ managed services concerns of security and compliance. Postini provides security, encryption, and compliance functionality as an online service for email, the web, and instant messaging, and therefore has been acquired to address these concerns.
Security and compliance are rather ‘traditional’ concerns of organizations looking to use managed services or hosted applications, firstly to ensure that their data and transactions are safe, and also that any legislative or regulatory requirements are being addressed. Most service providers can satisfy these requirements, but it may be the decision of the customer organization that this would be too much of a risk, and, as such, the service must remain delivered from an in-house platform.
Looking at the compliance issue in particular, the responsibility for compliance cannot be passed onto the service provider, and so remains the responsibility of the customer organization. Using a service provider does take some of the compliance function away from the customer but the responsibility, should something fail, remains firmly with the customer.
There are, however, benefits associated with service providers when it comes to compliance. These benefits include the development and use of consistent processes, ensuring that functions are being carried out in the same way every time they are performed. Formalized monitoring and reporting are further benefits, enabling the customer organization to be fully cognizant of the situation at any given time.
With this acquisition, Google is continuing to gather the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle it needs to position itself better as an on-demand application provider. However, in addition to this purchase, Google will need to continue in its quest to convince larger enterprises that it can address the issues of security and compliance for Google Apps, and fitting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together is going to be no mean feat.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
