Google bought e-mail security company Postini in July last year for $625 million in cash. Postini was producing technology used to encrypt and archive e-mails and instant messages which could also be used to protect a company’s entire web-based communications. At the moment of the acquisition, Postini protected more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide. Google today has about 40,000 businesses and 14 million users using Postini services.

Now Google will launch several new security products this Tuesday under the Powered by Postini brand. The offerings include message filtering with spam and malware filtering, for $3 per user per year; message filtering plus enhanced virus detection, content policy management, and other support to stop e-mail data leaks, for $12 per user per year; and message discovery, which adds one year of message data archiving, retention, and discovery to help companies comply with legal and government regulatory compliance requirements, for $25 per user per year.

"Formerly, this would have been about $100 per user," said Scott Petry, director of product management at Google, to Network World.

All of these new services are fully compatible with a large number of e-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise. However, it appears that in the long run Google wants to make businesses renounce their current solutions and adopt Google Apps.

"We think once they get comfortable with it ... the customer experience will be so much better that they'll be ready to use Google Apps on much broader level," said Sundar Raghavan, product marketing manager from Google, to InformationWeek.

The three levels of protection are dubbed Google Message Filtering, Google Message Security and Google Message Discovery. Interestingly enough, the policy management and a 90-day Google Message Discovery service are available as part of the Google Apps Premier Edition, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Start Page for creating a home page.