Sonian's Email & Data Archiving Blog:

Google's Postini Experiences Outages. Is it Time to Start Paying?

  

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Google's Postini experienced outages on Tuesday afternoon and evening, which affected its hosted email archiving service. 

According to InfoWorld:

"Google acknowledged the first problem shortly after 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, saying that "a significant subset of users" had been rendered unable to access Postini services... Later, between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., about 34 percent of users faced similar issues, apparently as a result of routine maintenance work done on Postini software and hardware."

To start, I will say that Google does a great thing by offering discounts to non-profits (some of the time), but this might be a cause of "you get what you pay for."  With a heavily discounted or free service (in the case of higher education), the IT resources needed to keep your data safe and accessible may not be as robust.

A paid service, which at first glance can seem less attractive than a free service, will by nature focus more heavily on the security, privacy, and reliability of its customers’ data—meaning that paying a small amount up front for solid archiving services can actually protect against the loss of millions of dollars in non-compliance or e-Discovery fees, as well as information losses.  When evaluating cloud providers, IT admins should acknowledge the need for tight SLAs as a way of insuring the accessibility of their archives.

Early last month, one major university decided to ditch Google, citing security concerns as the reason for the cancellation of service.  As reported in an InformationWeek exclusive:

"In a potential blow to Google's efforts to establish itself as a major player in enterprise software, a leading public university has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members — and it's got some harsh words for the search giant."

The major university mentioned above was the University of California-Davis. In the end, it is up to you and your institution's budget as to whether or not you decide to go with a paid service or a free service, but with major universities like UC-Davis opting to pay a little extra for the safety and security of their data, perhaps a paid archiving service is worth considering for your institution as well?

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