Google announces ‘Message Continuity’ service for backing up Microsoft Exchange emails

By Tom Warren, on 9th Dec 10 6:29 pm with 6 Comments

Google announced on Thursday a new cloud-based email continuity solution that helps businesses always have access to their email.

The service, Google Message Continuity, allows organizations that run systems such as Microsoft Exchange to replicate their email accounts into Google’s Cloud. Google replicates data using Gmail, Calendar and Contacts. In the event of an outage at an internal Microsoft Exchange server, users can log-in to Gmail and have access to all of their regular email, contacts and calendars.

Describing the service in a company blog post, Group Manager of Google Apps, Rajen Sheth, suggested that it’s an easy way for businesses to evaluate Google Apps. “Google Message Continuity can also help organizations transition to Google Apps down the road. Since Microsoft Exchange and Gmail are always in sync with one another, there’s no need to migrate email data when eventually deploying Google Apps,” he said.

Google’s service is powered by Postini, a start-up company that Google acquired in 2007. Postini provides cloud computing services for filtering email spam and malware. The service also archives emails.

  • Anonymous

    Seems pointless

  • GP007

    OR a business can just run a hosted Exchange service from MS directly and not have to worry at all.

  • Guest

    So now a business can sync its Exchange database with Google, which most likely means Google will be scanning for juicy corporate info. Um, yeah.

  • Guest

    What crap! All corporate email products have web interface too, be it exchange or anything else. Google is just trying to misguide people.

  • J Price

    I dont understand this point of this. As several people have already said, Exchange and other corporate email products have a web interface. I’m left thinking that its just a headline grabbing product. Some people will see this and think Google does it, must be good. And that will be the maximum extent of the thought given before exposing their company data to the massive search engine and database….

    • Tom W

      Exchange does have OWA yes but that doesn’t help if the Exchange server is offline. You’re right though, this is definitely an attention grabbing product but I know a few enterprises who currently have this in production for testing Google Apps so it’s likely an offering that is tempting for some.