An ediscovery application has been launched for Google Apps known as Vault aimed at reducing the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation and compliance actions.

Google says Vault provides extended management and information governance capabilities to proactively archive, retain and preserve Gmail and on-the-record chats.

It offers the ability to search and manage data based on terms, dates, senders, recipients and labels to give management, IT, legal and compliance users a systemised, repeatable and defensible platform.

Google Apps Vault can be added to an existing Google Apps account for an additional $US5 per user per month.

According to Craig McLaughlin, general manager at Australian Google Apps reseller BluePoint, this upgrade represents a significant enhancement.

“Organisations can now store unlimited amounts of archived email, for an unlimited timeframe, for less than the cost of a ham sandwich,” said McLaughlin.

“It will be very hard for IT managers to justify the cost of expensive on-site email archiving when all the old data can be migrated to the cloud for $5 a user. The cloud continues to deliver economies of scale that organisations can no longer ignore.”