Email managed security firm Postini has added email discovery to its hosted messaging services.
The new Postini Message Discovery tool will help customers find data and information stored in archived email and instant messages, according to the company. It hopes the feature will be particularly suited to email discovery needed for litigation.
There are three tiers in the new service; basic, standard and professional. While the basic service is aimed at businesses who need an online digital archive to optimise mail servers and support easy search, the standard service is marketed at businesses that need greater control over storage pools and personal archive access for end users. The professional service offers immutable storage of message data.
Administrators can use Postini's unified policy management capabilities to manage message retention and deletion policies for their entire company. They can enable search for specific messages by key words, sender, date and other attributes. It is also offering a toolbar for Outlook and Notes clients for users to search for messages.
Experts said that the explosion of message data has created a discovery problem for most companies.
"Companies need to evaluate the legal and IT risks associated with using back-up tapes and disks from an e-Discovery perspective," said Cynthia Jackson, a partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP. "Small and medium businesses are particularly vulnerable to cost overruns in case of a data loss or lawsuit because they do not have the IT resources of large companies."
Postini was recently acquired by Google for 312 million.
