Possibly a small era in the field of secure computing is giving way to a larger trend of consolidation under a common brand. Postini – the secure email service that Google acquired in 2007 for $625 million to provide a full range of security and compliance services to Google Apps is now finally going to be shut down – presumably its functionality has been fully integrated into Google Apps.
On August 21, 2012, Google announced that it was shutting down Postini and its security features have now been amalgamated into Google Apps for business and into Google Apps Vault which is a service that archives and help manage / search e-mail archives.
The transition will occur by 2013 and existing customers will be moved to Google Apps as shown in the table below –
As a result, Postini is now more closely integrated into Google Apps. This makes the overall service more robust since you work with a unified portal and not with different applications. Google Apps also works with non Gmail mail servers. So if you are using Lotus Notes or MS Exchange, you will continue to get Postini capabilities. Postini has nearly 26 million users, so the move is going to give a large user base to Google Apps. The size of the user base iself is indicative of the popularity of the application.
However, there is one issue that Google needs to look at. The Postini website is still appearing to accept new customers. Possibly at some stage of order acceptance, the system will stop accepting your card and maybe in a day or so the Postini website will be updated to indicate the new reality at Google. Till then, Postini seems to be going strong.
The Google Apps site does not mention the amalgamation explicitly, however, the service characteristics are clearly part of the capabilities of the mailing applications. Postini is merging into Google Apps and it is just a matter of time before this fine application also becomes a faded memory, amalgamated into this huge juggernaut called Google.