When we talk to customers, the same themes keep coming up. Data is exploding beyond email. Investigations are getting more complex. Compliance timelines are tightening. And somewhere in the middle of all of that is a team of legal, compliance, and IT professionals trying to hold it all together, often with tools that weren’t built for this moment.
That’s exactly what our Governance, Compliance & Insights (GCI) team addressed in the fifth episode of Maximizing Mimecast.
Watch the full recording Or read on for the highlights.
The World Has Changed. Governance Needs to Keep Up
Email compliance was a familiar problem—archive it, retain it, produce it when legal calls. But the modern workplace runs on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Viva Engage too, and your governance posture must follow.
Both Forrester and Gartner are converging on the same insight: human behavior must be continuously monitored and understood. Mimecast’s GCI suite is our answer to that reality—be the single source of truth for collaboration data, immediately accessible and usable across the entire enterprise.
Search and Discover for Email Is Here and It’s Free for Archive Customers
The biggest announcement from this session: Search and Discover is now available for email data, included at no additional cost for all Mimecast Cloud Archiving customers.
Originally built with technology Mimecast acquired from Aware, Search and Discover is an AI-powered universal search experience designed for investigations, e-discovery, DSARs, legal holds, and archiving. It already covered Slack, Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, and Google Chat—email is now part of that ecosystem, meaning you can run a single query across all integrated communication channels simultaneously.
To get started: Log into your Admin Console, navigate to the new “Governance and Compliance” section (formerly labelled “Archive”), and follow the modal to activate. Your existing email data is immediately connected. Introducing Search & Discover for Email
What Makes Search and Discover Different
There are a few things about how Search and Discover is built that are genuinely worth calling out—not as marketing, but as real workflow differences.
Start with keywords, not custodians
Many e-discovery tools require you to know who you’re looking for before you begin. That’s a problem for early-stage investigations where you might not yet know who’s involved. Search and Discover lets you start with a keyword, a topic, a phrase—and find the risk before you’ve identified the people tied to it.
Real-time result counts before you run the query
As you refine your search, Search and Discover shows approximate result counts in real time—before you click “run.” Investigators can size a case, validate a topic, and adjust without repeated full searches.
AI that assists, never replaces your judgment
Mimecast takes a deliberate approach to AI in GCI products. You’re always in control of the foundational search query—AI helps find the needle in the haystack, it doesn’t define the haystack for you.
SLM filters tag content with behavioural signals like toxic language or communication risk, reducing thousands of results to a precise, reviewable set. The Ask Agent lets you query results in natural language, with every response traceable to specific messages. No black boxes. No mystery.
And critically: no customer data is ever sent to an external LLM for training. All AI functionality operates within your environment, under your existing terms and conditions. Mimecast is the first cybersecurity company to achieve ISO 42001 certification for AI management systems—this is a commitment, not just a claim. AI Capabilities in Search and Discover
A Word on DSARs and the Tightening Compliance Landscape
For those in the UK and EU: the ICO received over 15,000 data subject access request complaints last year, now representing roughly a third of their entire caseload. Organizations have 30 days to respond to DSARs, and the cost of non-compliance is rising. Search and Discover’s ability to search across email, Teams, Slack, and Google Chat in a single query—and export only the subject’s own data—helps you meet that window without over-collecting or oversharing.
What’s Coming in Q2 and Beyond
The session also gave us a chance to share what’s on the near-term roadmap. Here are the highlights:
- Microsoft Teams historical scan: Already available for ingesting and searching historic Teams data. Reach out to your account manager to find out more.
- Redaction in Search and Discover: One of our most-requested features. By end of Q2, you’ll be able to find and redact content directly within a result set and export fully redacted files for case handoff—no more printing and using markers.
- PDF export: More flexible output options for case workflows, coming alongside redaction in Q2.
- Advanced Boolean search: AND, OR, NOT logic — standard for investigators, now on the roadmap.
- To/From filters for email: A table-stakes capability being prioritized this quarter.
- OneDrive, SharePoint, and Google Drive support: Coming later this year — the most-requested integration based on customer polling.
MCP: Bringing Mimecast Into Your AI Workflows
Mimecast is launching an early-access MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration for Search and Discover in Q2. MCP lets enterprise LLMs—like Microsoft Copilot, Claude, or OpenAI—interact with external systems.
Investigators describe a legal matter or compliance scenario in natural language, and the MCP tool translates it into a structured Search and Discover query—complete with custodians, date ranges, and keywords. Fully traceable and repeatable.
Early access is available for existing Search and Discover customers—reach out to your account team if you’re interested.
Simpler Plans, Clearer Value: Introducing Core, Pro, and Max
If you’ve looked at your Mimecast quote and wondered why there are separate SKUs for Archive, Supervision, Signal, Spotlight, and Search and Discover—you’re not alone.
Coming soon, GCI products move to a three-tier structure—modeled after our email security approach:
- Core: Archiving, e-discovery, investigations, DSARs, and legal holds across your communication channels. A natural, cost-neutral migration for most existing archive customers.
- Pro: Adds proactive monitoring, supervision, and collaboration data protection.
- Max: Unlocks risk intelligence through Spotlight, turning captured data into proactive organizational insight.
All plans are priced per user covering all available integrations—no counting connectors, no fluctuating consumption billing. Simple, predictable pricing mapped to your use cases.
No existing plans are being retired in the near term. More details as we move toward availability.
On the Horizon: File Coverage and a New Backup & Recovery Product
Two larger investments worth flagging for the second half of 2025:
File-based system support (OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive) is in active development with early access expected this summer and GA targeted for Q3.
A purpose-built Microsoft 365 Backup & Recovery product is also in development—Exchange support launches this summer, with full file-system coverage in Q3–Q4.
Get Started Today
If you’re a Mimecast Cloud Archiving customer and haven’t activated Search and Discover yet, there’s no reason to wait. Log into your Admin Console, navigate to Governance and Compliance, and follow the setup modal. It’s available to all Cloud Archive customers at no extra charge, and the AI capabilities are included. Introducing Search & Discover for Email
If you have questions about which plan or integrations are right for your organization—or want early access to redaction, MCP, or file-based system support—reach out to your Mimecast account manager.
The data that matters most to your organization—the conversations, decisions, and communications that define your risk and your culture—is already there. We’re building the tools to help you govern, search, and understand it.
