In GMail attacks Outlook, Nicholas Carr reports on Google’s new service clearly geared towards companies: GMail on your own domain with administrative management tools. Google blogs about it here.
This is, of course, not dissimilar from what Microsoft is going to do with Office Live. They are already doing it for personal accounts with Windows Live Custom Domains, but that seems geared toward vanity domains.

These kinds of products will be very compelling to small to mid-size businesses, and eventually, even large enterprises; though I would like to know more about how they protect company data.

• How will GMail isolate company data and ensure that it never gets shared with other customers?
• How secure is the GMail database? Leaving aside the issues raised by the EFF yesterday, what are the security procedures in place at Google to ensure that customer data are secure? I’m not just talking about secure from external hackers but also from Google employees.

I’m sure they have this all covered, but I’d like to know how. Issues surronding security will be the #1 barrier to adoption of these types of servers — these guys ought to lead with answers to these questions.

But, if they can solve these issues, Google (and Microsoft, too) will hammer Outlook and Exchange.
Add built-in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and you have a killer-app.