Google on Thursday announced a new partnership that will bring full scale encryption to Google Apps.

Working with email data protection company Zix, Google has launched a new commercial product for Google Apps accounts dubbed Google Apps Message Encryption (GAME).

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Although Google already supports secure, encrypted messages within its servers, email messages sent to other systems are not encrypted.

Organizations or users can use various workarounds to add PGP (public-key cryptography) to their messages, but those solutions are kludgy and not ideal for an organization with lots of users.

With GAME, Google and Zix are hoping to change that. GAME is available for $35 a year per user and allows Google Apps admins to configure encryption settings and routes from the Google Apps dashboard.

In a post-Snowden world, it's easy to think email encryption is primarily useful to keep prying eyes (such as the NSA) from intercepting messages. For regulated industries however, encrypted communications are an important part of doing business.

Many of Zix's customers are hospitals, banks and government organizations and its product for compliance with federal regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI-DSSS.

This isn't the first time Google has offered a message encryption product for its enterprise customers. GAME is a successor to another Zix-powered product, Google Message Encryption (GME). GME was part of the Postini suite of tools for email and web security. Unlike GAME, however, GME was never directly integrated with Google Apps. Instead, Google Apps admins had to login to the Postini dashboard to set-up policies and rules.

Since 2012, Google has been in the process of transitioning its Postini services to the Google Apps platform. GAME is the result of that transition that works natively with the Google Apps.

For organizations that need to send end-to-end encrypted messages, having an option built directly into Google Apps is a great feature. With any luck, we might eventually see this option trickle-down to traditional Gmail users.