Case Study: Prince George's County school district streamlines email archiving and cuts IT costs with Google's Postini services

"Choosing Google has meant saving a much-appreciated $1 million per year in the midst of a fiscal crisis," said Wesley Watts, CIO of the district.

Like many organizations, Prince George's County Public Schools (PGCPS) was struggling with a traditional on-premise email system, with multiple mail gateways that required a lot of IT staff to maintain. Complying with requirements for legal discovery and open records requirements was also a huge challenge. In particular, the school district's IT department struggled to ensure a complete collection of requested data.

For cost containment reasons, the school district kept backup data on tapes for only 60 days. This presented a challenge if they were asked to recover older email, which was often stored in other locations and required IT managers to perform more complex and time-consuming searches. Moreover, users had the ability to delete their own email, sometimes before it was backed up, making it difficult to control how thoroughly backup data was actually collected.