MSPmentor

Google Message Continuity, the Postini-powered, Gmail-leveraging message continuity service, now supports backing up Microsoft Exchange 2010. But despite the potential benefits, extending Google Message Continuity like this raises more questions than it answers. Here’s why.

A quick refresher: Google Message Continuity costs $25/user/year, and keeps copies of all the enterprise’s e-mails in a Gmail-like interface. So in the event of Exchange server downtime — a happening that Google estimates as ten times more likely than a Gmail outage — critical data is still available through any web browser. It’s an approach that Microsoft has reluctantly endorsed with one hand while disavowing it on the other.

But Microsoft has spent a lot of cash on promoting Exchange Server 2010′s built-in business continuity features. So why extend Google Message Continuity to a platform if Microsoft — in theory — has already addressed the need? To me, it seems like psychological warfare. Google Message Continuity is already promoted as an on-ramp to Google’s cloud services, and by protecting Exchange 2010 servers, it’s just enhancing the Trojan Horse play of getting all the important stuff onto Google Apps anyway.

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