BITSoftware / Blog

Businesses of all sizes need to be prepared for the unexpected. In legal actions, a business can be required to turn over all emails on a topic, or between certain employees. It’s a huge and expensive headache to hunt down these emails, especially for smaller businesses who don’t have dedicated IT staff. Even then, there’s no guarantee they’ll really get everything relevant.

Now, Gmail business customers get a huge help. Because Google launched a new feature for Google Apps for Business, Google Vault. Vault is an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for managing information critical to your business and preserving important data. This new app can reduce the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation and compliance actions. And lets IT staff make sure that all relevant emails are stored forever, then gives them an easy way to search those emails. Vault helps protect your business so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations, with an instant-on functionality and availability of your data a few clicks away. With Vault, you will find the information you need, when you need it.

Vault also lets IT staff set policies for when an email should be deleted. For instance, when an employee leaves the company, Vault could be set to automatically delete all emails to and from that employee within 90 days. That could be useful because Gmail (unlike traditional email systems) is designed to store everything forever.

Moreover, Vault gives management, IT, legal and compliance users a systemized, repeatable and defensible platform that will reduce the costs and risks of doing business.

Vault is built on the same modern, 100% web-based architecture as Google Apps. Unlike traditional solutions, it does not require a complex and costly IT environment, and can be deployed in a matter of minutes. For start, the new feature for Google Apps for Business works with Gmail and Google Chat sessions, but not over long time it will work with other data in Apps, like documents stored in GDocs, as Google`s officials said.

Sources: Google Official Blog, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Google Apps

I recently read an interesting interview about mobile business intelligence, BI trends and cloud computing with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. The interview was made by Jason Stamper from Computer Business Review, who is now widely regarded throughout Europe as „The Economist” of the IT industry.

What caught my attention was Michael Saylor`s statement about BI trends: „There are three electric waves, if not tsunamis, that are striking the technology world right now: the mobile network transformation, the cloud network transformation, and the social network transformation”.

Referring to mobile BI, he said that he was enthusiastic „since really the iPhone 3”. „I think it was an inflection point because it was really the first smartphone with the full power of a computer that could start to run software applications that otherwise you’d have gone on to the web for. Since that point we’ve seen a progressive transformation and migration from computation on the desktop in the Windows API to computation in the mobile API”, he said. Then, talking about mobile, cloud and social, Saylor stated: „Our company’s reaction is to push the accelerator to the floor. We’ve aggressively increased our software development rate. We’ve created an application development division to create applications that integrate the social and cloud networks back into our customers’ applications and also our own. We’ve created a Cloud Intelligence division to go ahead and put in place our own backbone.”

And he concluded: „We want to make sure that when four intelligent guys create the next application to help you choose your doctor, or choose where you’re going to go or how you’re going to live, they can deploy it out to 100,000 or a million people without having to establish a 100-person IT department.”

If you are interested, you can read the entire interview here.