Last December Google announced a new service from its Postini acquisition called Google Message Continuity. The service allows administrators to backup their on-premise Exchange servers to Gmail, so that in the event of an Exchange outage users can still access their e-mail. Today, Google announced the service is now available for Exchange 2010 servers as well.
Illustration of how Google Message Continuity works
In the announcement, Google once again cites research indicating that Exchange servers face more downtime than Gmail. By Google’s own approximation, its service offers 99.984%. Google recently altered its service level agreement for Google Apps to compensate users for planned downtime and downtime less than 10 minutes.
Source: The Radicati Group, 2010. “Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011.
Exchange administrators: what do you think of Google Message Continuity? Is this a service you would actually want? I can’t shake the feeling that this is actually more of a marketing ploy for Google to highlight Gmail’s availability than a service the company expects people to actually use.
