Ditching Postini, switching to Google Vault

For the 12-strong IT department at Caraustar, a Georgia-based recycled paper packaging company, switching from Google Postini to the Google Vault email archiving and management service was a matter of saving time, as much as anything.

"We're trying to do as much as possible [in the cloud]," says Debbie Farley, an IT department business analyst. "We're working to automate as much stuff as we can."

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Cloud accessibility is particularly important for companies that have to coordinate with a large number of physical facilities, like Caraustar.

Google bills Vault as a robustly featured email archiving and management service focused on e-discovery and compliance requirements. The company has been rolling features of Postini, a similar service that it bought up in 2007, into Vault for some time, announcing last week that it would discontinue Postini within months.

Caraustar, however, would have made the move away from Postini in any case, Farley says. Vault's cloud-based technology helped make it attractive to the Caraustar team, according to Farley.

"We didn't have to monitor the servers and worry about rebooting them or software upgrades. It alleviated a lot of the staffing requirements to support Lotus Notes," she says.

"Basically, when we were looking at what we were going to do, we stepped back and said 'If we were a brand-new company, what would we want to do?'" Farley says.

Caraustar is also beginning to use more products in the Google ecosystem, she adds.

"We have more and more people who are beginning to discover Google Drive ... several of our locations use Google Sites," she says.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

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