A colleague forwarded this link – http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1035 – about the new “Postini web filtering tool”. My initial reactions were twofold.

First, that Google now thinks it’s a managed-security services company … I just don’t understand. The company is like college freshmen – they’ll try anything once (at least). On the other hand, Google clearly has industry-leading expertise in managing information. But security services is a crowded market with big players, and Google has no pre-existing reputation in security. I doubt the margins will be like search; let me put it that way.

Second, the Postini solution, as described in that post (which is admittedly quite brief) claims the advantage of not requiring a VPN connection. At the surface, eliminating VPNs for remote access to a corporate network is a good goal, since they tend to be slow and expensive to support. The hitch is that most VPNs include robust authentication and encryption technology, and deploying an equally secure and functional alternative is at least as difficult.

My point is, if Postini isn’t using VPN, does that mean that all corporate data to be scanned is being sent in cleartext over the internet?

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