If your organization is like most, you are increasingly dependent on email for day-to-day business correspondence. But as email volumes grow, so do the legal implications of storing these messages. In the event of litigation, the legal discovery process often requires you to locate and recover pertinent messages quickly and comprehensively. Sheer message volume can make meeting these requirements with existing technology prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. How can you ensure that large volumes of email are easily accessible for your organization without significant investment in new infrastructure?

Google Message Discovery, powered by Postini, is a secure, hosted email archiving service that enables you to:

• Create a centralized and searchable email repository for your organization
• Quickly search across the archive to collect email for legal discovery
• Secure your email from spam, viruses and other threats

Manage Email Retention without Expensive Investment in Storage Capacity

Google Message Discovery is delivered in an on-demand, Software as a Service (SaaS) model, so you don’t have to worry about planning for current and future storage capacity needs – Google does it for you. By storing your messages in Google’s secure and geographically redundant data centers, you can ensure that messages will not be lost in the event of an onsite server failure. You can archive all mail without worrying whether you have enough disk space and eliminate storage quota headaches by allowing users to access historical mail. In addition, by offloading excessive mail from your existing servers, you can decrease backup windows and reduce recovery times.

Collect Email Quickly and Easily for Legal Discovery

When your company is involved in litigation or conducting an internal investigation, time is of the essence. You simply cannot afford to sift through back-up tapes, email servers, hard drives, and laptops looking for a particular set of messages. Delays in producing the right evidence can result in significant fines, lost revenue, or irreparable damage to your corporate reputation.

With Google Message Discovery, access to all your archived messages is always at your fingertips. What’s more, legal, human resources, and compliance staff do not need to rely on IT personnel to conduct searches and inquiries. Google’s easy-to-use web-based interface lets anyone – even end-users – manage and search the message archive, depending on specific roles and authorizations. And because Google Message Discovery saves all messages based on your defined retention policies, indexes them, and stores them in a centralized repository, you can quickly and easily pinpoint relevant messages, place them on litigation hold to disable message deletion, and share them with legal counsel, law enforcement officers, or regulatory officials.

Deliver Secure, Spam-free Email for your Users

Google Message Discovery also includes a complete set of email security features, so you can provide the highest levels of security for your email systems – without installing expensive hardware or software. Block spam, viruses, and other external threats before they reach your organization and ensure proprietary information that must remain confidential stays within your organization. You can also define which emails – within and beyond your network – must be encrypted, providing an additional layer of security. Plus, because these security features are built into Google Message Discovery, you can manage all your messaging-related policies from a single, central console.

Figure 1: Message Discovery flow
1. Comprehensive message capture: messages are be routed in real time to Google via the common envelope journaling capability on your email server. Alternatively, inbound and outbound email can be archived as part of the overall processing Google performs during our real-time threat analysis.
2. Always On, Always Current Message Security: Routing messages through Google's market-leading Message Security functionality provides real-time threat protection, virus detection, content-based filtering, and policyenforced TLS encryption.
3. Secure hosted archiving: Messages and their attachments are stored and indexed in a central repository. Retention policy managment enables customers to enables policies at the user or organization to meet internal and external retention requirements.
4. Search, discovery, extraction and reporting tools: Permission-based access provides authorized individuals with advanced tools to quickly and easily search, place litigation holds, and extract relevant email.
5. Extensive Reporting: Usage and audit reporting provide the information necessary to monitor all activities that occur within the company archive.