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Google adds Postini security into hosted apps offering

Google Apps Premier Edition now offers enhanced security and more storage.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills

Move over Microsoft.

Google is beefing up its outsourced e-mail offering aimed at corporations and universities, adding security features that large companies demand.

Three weeks after closing its acquisition of Postini, Google has integrated the company's security and government regulation services into Google Apps Premier Edition. That suite includes hosted e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, Docs & Spreadsheets and Web page creation software.

Google also has increased the size of the storage to 25 gigabytes from 10 gigabytes and now allows customers to run Google Apps along with another e-mail program.

The Postini software enables companies to customize spam and virus filtering and restore messages that were inadvertently deleted in the last 90 days, among other things.

It's obviously too early to see what effect the security boost will have on sales of Google Apps Premier Edition. As many as 1,500 businesses have been signing up per day, according to Scott Petry, founder of Postini and a product management director at Google.