The new product, powered by Google's 2007 acquisition of Postini, focuses on giving companies another access point to their e-mail accounts. It essentially creates a complete backup copy of Microsoft Exchange Servers and puts those e-mails into a Google Apps account, replicating that information within Gmail, Calendar and Contacts.
The hope is that when a company's e-mail servers go down, it will be able to boot up Google's cloud-based solution and continue its work without interruption. Google and Exchange are constantly synced to make sure Message Continuity is up-to-date. And because it's cloud-based, the only way it goes down is if Google goes down.
It's also a not-so-sneaky attempt by the search giant to get enterprises to switch from Outlook to Gmail. "Since Microsoft Exchange and Gmail are always in sync with one another, there’s no need to migrate e-mail data when eventually deploying Google Apps," the company said in its blog post.
Google acquired Postini in 2007 for $625 million for its cloud-based e-mail technology. It's the basis for some of Google's cloud security features.