Most users of the internet whether they use it for browsing, work or just staying in touch have heard of spam, malware, phishing and viruses. Those who have had experience of any of them know how irritating and distressing they can be.
The irritation of having your inbox full of emails trying to sell you something you do not want or the distress of losing your PC and having to replace it have been experienced by many people around the world.
For the home user these scenarios are bad enough but if you are a business the effects can be devastating with the possibility that the business could suffer financial loss leading to the business collapsing and unemployment of staff; for this reason businesses invest a lot of time and money fighting the threat.
What is Postini?
For those businesses’s taking advantage of Google Apps cloud computing services, Postini is an email and web security and archiving service that is integrated with other applications and services within their cloud. Postini represents a state of the art service for filtering spam and malware before it arrives at the business user’s mail box and ensuring the business is compliant with its own use of the internet.
Why use Postini?
Business’s already using Google Apps have realised the benefits of cloud computing services specifically the cost and time savings that can be made when running a business. This similarly applies to the use of Postini. IT departments within companies spend a lot of time and money providing servers and applications to combat the threat and reality of spam, viruses and malware. Add this to the effects of the system going down when they have been unsuccessful and the toll is high. Well, if you use Postini all of this disappears literally into the ether because Google take over all the responsibility of protecting your business from such attacks before they get anywhere near you.
So what does actually does Postini offer?
• Google message security – This feature offers network protection from viruses, spam and malware and it will also assist you in defining usage policies to comply with legislation and best practice. Message security also protects sensitive data using SSL or TSL and guarantees availability and delivery to a level of 99.999%.
• Google message discovery – Allows you to store emails as long as you wish with unlimited storage space for messages on the server. It also comes with security features to protect your mail and the ability to locate a message quickly.
• Google message continuity – Gives 25GB’s of storage space for each Gmail account and auto synchronisation that allows you to access your account via the internet even if the local server is down and gives you the reassurance your emails are up to date.
• Google message encryption – Allows for encryption of emails and the setting up and analysing of content policies.
• You will not have to install software or hardware and the system requires the minimum of maintenance.
Overall Postini offers a high level of security and reliability at a fraction of the cost of running your own email and web security services; with the added benefit of being fully compatible with your existing Google Apps package.