Companies today are facing stiff challenges securing their data in an environment
where threats are becoming more complex and governance requirements demand more diligence. Email archiving is evolving to keep pace.
Mimecast’s growing fleet of Digital Communication Governance, Compliance &
Insights solutions are built with the vision and belief in mind that the most critical
risk and insight about a company’s employees, its brand, and its customers lives in this rapid real-time data where humans work and communicate.
Evolving data set = new set of risks
This modern data set is different and continuous. It’s a heterogeneous
environment and it introduces unique human behaviors that never had to be
accounted for in the past.
Looking at Mimecast’s internal research, for every 166 messages, at least one message contains highly sensitive information such as IP, passwords or company secrets.
• One in 53 messages are either modified or deleted by end users.
• One in 13 messages are now coming from external users in Slack or Teams.
• Three in five images that get uploaded into new chat systems are software
screenshots, often containing sensitive data.
• 43% of messages are in private locations which security teams don’t have access to.
In the wrong hands, these messages can create costly risks and additional work for organizations. Over the past year, some major brands have shut off collaboration tools because they were concerned about what their employees were sharing. Others have had to scramble to repair their reputations after having sensitive data exposed. Employees that try to cover their tracks by deleting data in these systems often leave their employers with no native way to restore conversations.
This leaves us with a new issue: Tons of unstructured data and multiple stakeholders that need visibility, access, and control of it.
Speeding “time to context”
Traditionally, E-Discovery has been the main use case for legal teams, but now the market is shifting left as security teams rely more on the use of internal investigation and forensic tools to stay ahead of litigation events.
There’s also a push to be more proactive with human risk, to be more resilient. Analyst reports back up this statement. Gartner predicts that by 2029, 30% of enterprises will shift to a proactive employee digital communication governance approach, to improve corporate policy outcomes, and advance business insights, up from less than 10% in 2025.
The median value loss for a company after experiencing a brand or reputational crisis is 30%. But losses from the same types of crises drop to 4% when there is a response within hours of it occurring, 10% when it’s within days, and 14% or more when it takes weeks to address it.
The biggest reason companies drag their feet is they lack immediate access and visibility to the context they need to make those responses – what Mimecast describes as time to context. The lack of context typically presents itself in two forms: either not knowing where or what data was involved in the incident or crisis, or not truly knowing why employees took the actions they did.
These systems usually have the answers, but sometimes the answers are impossible to get to in a timely manner. Our mission at Mimecast is to make this data immediately accessible, usable and valuable across the entire enterprise.
For years, we’ve supported the traditional use cases of cloud archiving, email supervision, sync and recover, and user inbox for email. And now with our latest enhancements, we’ve layered on AI first, proactive experiences for the future of work.
3 key drivers behind the roadmap
1. Heterogeneous communication environments
Given the urgency to respond to security threats, it’s critical to be able to find information quickly. Currently, security teams are left scrambling to interview employees and collect screenshots of conversations – if they even exist anymore. This can take hours, if not days or weeks, sometimes with no solution at the end of the process.
Teams that currently use Mimecast’s Search and Discover product to analyze Teams or Slack data and Mimecast Cloud Archive to review email data have had to sift through two separate data sets. Customers have asked to find a way to leverage both engines in a single unified search experience.
Now they can. We’ve built the integration with customers’ existing email archive to work with the powerful capabilities of Search and Discover, allowing them to search all connected data sources from a single AI-powered application experience. Now they can query searches, all provisioned around data access sets, tied to roles, making sure the right user has the right access to data at the start. And they can search across all communication channels based on user profiles, keywords and other criteria.
2. Intentional AI
AI is already playing a role in virtually every technology practice – and Digital Communications Governance and Archiving is no exception. Gartner reports that by 2030, 70% of enterprises using DCGA solutions will adopt AI-driven features and processes – up from 40% in 2025.
The good news is that Mimecast customers are already using AI – they’re already in that 70%. The better news: AI will make their lives even easier in the coming years.
One good example of Mimecast’s AI capability is the extra context and intelligence the Mimecast Mihra (Mimecast Intelligent Human Risk Agent) AI platform applies to every single message coming through our system. Mihra works behind the scenes, looking at the message, sorting through signals, making the central platform more intelligent.
When an investigation has to be done quickly, AI can save time and headaches. Picture a case where a security team does a search for all communications sent and received by a department that potentially could have been the source of a data leak. Looking across all channels, the number of communications could reach into the tens of thousands. Right away, Mihra brings back a summarization of the search result, letting the team know if it’s on the right track.
Using Mimecast’s collaboration specific filters and further Mihra analyses, the team can quickly narrow down the applicable communications down to two or three digits, hastening a conclusion to the investigation. Every response that comes through can also be traced back to the actual context that the response was generated from.
3. Improving customer experiences
As the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, by 2029 85% of DCGA customers will consolidate the supervision of text and audio video-based content to a single solution, which is a major increase from less than 20% in 2025. This is why Mimecast architected and designed our platform the way we did – to be agnostic to data sources while being intentional about their unique experiences.
Our latest innovation involves an expansion into the Google Workspace data sets beyond email. We now support archiving, searching, monitoring and gaining insights from Google Chat. Just like our other integrations, keeping native context is key.
Our latest innovation involves an expansion into the Google Workspace data sets beyond email. We now support archiving, searching, monitoring and gaining insights from Google Chat. Just like our other integrations, keeping native context is key.
Digital Communications Governance & Archiving has evolved far beyond simple email archiving. Mimecast is working on new capabilities to expand the role we play in the space, helping companies protect and manage their all-important data. Adding new data sources, improving the range of our intentional AI, and providing unified user experiences will give customers the strength and versatility they need to manage threats today and into the future.
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