Postini: Google’s Take on E-Mail Security

The computer security industry historically borrows military defence concepts to combat digital threats, literally creating war rooms where experts follow attacks in progress on huge screens with phones ringing off the hook. Not so at Google’s Postini e-mail security service provider unit. Instead, computerised systems monitor 3 billion messages per day that flow in and out of customer systems and pass through Postini’s thousands of machines in data centres around the US and in Europe before hitting the Internet. The Postini system is highly automated, distributed, and scalable, characteristic of all of Google’s operations