By Joel Hruska
May 08, 2008 - 05:25PM CT

Google has been boosting its Google Apps product suite as fit for corporate use for months, with new security and deployment features arriving on a regular basis. The company's latest endeavor, Google Web Security for Enterprise, is now available, and promises to provide a consistent level of system security whether an end-user is surfing from the office or working at home halfway across town.

The new service is branded under Google's "Powered by Postini" product line and, according to the company, "provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. An additional feature extends the same protections to users working remotely on laptops in hotels, cafes, and even guest networks." The service is presumably activated by signing in directly to a Google service, as Google explicitly states that workers do not need access to a corporate network.

Unlike other Google-purchased companies languished for a long time after being acquired, the Postini brand and related products have been the foundation of many of Google's corporate-oriented initiatives this year. It's a marked contrast to the company's behavior in recent years, during which several companies were purchased and apparently left to rot with no clear sense of how their own products and services would be integrated into the Google product portfolio.

The service itself appears to allow company IT administrators a certain amount of fine-grained monitoring and control over end-user surfing, as illustrated in the screenshots below. The screenshot above shows the various filtering options an IT administrator can set for individual accounts. These permissions can presumably be tuned remotely—a machine leaving the office and the protection of the office firewall could be configured for tighter security even after the employee in question had left the building.