You can now use Gmail to backup Microsoft Exchange

If you work in a corporate environment, you are surely aware of the veritable nightmare that comes when the company’s email system goes offline, or even worse, loses data. It’s  a constant potential disaster waiting to happen.

Google, always looking to bolster its enterprise offerings, has today introduced “Google Message Continuity” to solve that problem. If you run Microsoft Exchange, you can run Gmail alongside of it, keeping you alive and emailing even if your Exchange servers take a dive.

Google explains it in the following way:

If [your] Microsoft Exchange Server fails, or requires scheduled maintenance or downtime, all you have to do is log into Gmail and continue regular, up-to-date email communication through Google. Since Gmail and Microsoft Exchange are constantly synchronized with each other, you can seamlessly switch from one email environment to the other.

What will the impact of this new feature be? Aside from the obvious intimation that Microsoft Exchange is a product that needs to be supported to be reliable enough to use, Google is slowly eking its products into the enterprise world by any means possible.

Microsoft had no immediate comment on the matter. After initial research, we have seen no evidence that Hotmail, Microsoft’s cloud email offering, can accomplish a similar task as Google Message Continuity.

Update: Microsoft did get back to us with the following statement:

Businesses rely on Exchange more than any other messaging solution because of its enterprise grade management and security.  An incredible 73% of large organizations in the US use Exchange as their primary email system with the next closest email platform at 2%.  Our customers have and will continue to benefit from the large ecosystem of hundreds of third party solutions that extend and complement Exchange.  With their announcement, Google joins an existing list of email continuity providers for Exchange.