Enterprise Information Archiving: 7 Straight Years a Magic Quadrant ‘Leader’

As Gartner points out, archiving operates in a digital communications and application environment that’s changed rapidly in recent years. And to be a “Leader” among the providers of enterprise archiving products and services requires an ability to execute and a clarity of vision that enables companies to “anticipate and begin to deliver on future requirements” even as they meet today’s customer needs. That’s why being named to the Leaders quadrant in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving for the seventh straight year is meaningful to Mimecast. 

Consistent Innovation, Positive CX Drive Email Archiving Leadership

One reason for the seven-year run is that Mimecast views enterprise information archiving as strategically important to customers, so we heavily invest in future development of Mimecast Cloud Archive and its supporting functions. Within the past year, Gartner notes, Mimecast added archiving for Microsoft Teams to help organizations secure new channels and address governance in an era of remote and hybrid work, where more business-critical communication happens through Teams and similar platforms. So, too, we’ve added new e-discovery review categories and search criteria, as well as new advanced lexicons for compliance supervision. And more is on the way.

Another key strength, in Gartner’s words, is that “Gartner clients consistently report a positive customer experience using the Mimecast Cloud Archive solution.” Mimecast has always prioritized outstanding customer experience and support. The comments of real customers in venues like Gartner Peer Insights provides ample evidence. Gartner also noted as a strength the way Mimecast’s cloud archiving solution integrates with and extends our email security, continuity and backup and recovery offerings.

What’s Behind Our Email Archiving Leadership

Mimecast’s leadership approach has been to focus development teams on building a capable, well-rounded archiving platform that maximizes value to the most people. Mimecast Cloud Archive encompasses many specific functions that improve the user experience for a diverse set of stakeholders, including information technology, security, legal and compliance professionals, and end users-. 

We’ve worked to make our platform especially easy to deploy and use. When we empower diverse users to securely access their old attachments, files and project data in just seconds — enforced by rigorous service guarantees — that’s a big win for everyone. When we expose key archiving functionality via well-documented open APIs, we help organizations improve decision-making and resilience in areas that go beyond the archive alone. 

Meeting Global Data Sovereignty Compliance 

Consider customers that operate internationally. They must keep sensitive or personal data where it’s legally permitted and govern themselves in this regard throughout their IT infrastructures. Some public cloud solutions, such as Amazon AWS, provide tools that let companies granularly manage where data is stored in order to achieve data sovereignty compliance. Mimecast Cloud Archive takes a different approach, serving customers in different regions from dedicated data centers. In that way, Mimecast Cloud Archive supports unique regional requirements throughout the U.S. and Canada; in post-Brexit UK; the EU via a German data center; and in the Asia-Pacific region, via Australia. That addresses the needs of the vast majority of organizations.

Protecting & Archiving Collaboration Data

In the last couple of years, organizations everywhere deployed online collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to reinvent business processes with their suddenly distributed workforces — and demand spiked for protecting and archiving the data those tools produce. Adding robust search and discovery for Microsoft Teams became another way for Mimecast to deliver the fastest, biggest win to the most archiving customers with the least cost and complexity. In core regulatory, compliance, and e-discovery applications, organizations need to rapidly find needles in haystacks – and, today, the relevant needles are generally found in email and enterprise collaboration systems. We intend to roll out support for other collaboration tools in the future.

Moreover, as customers realize the additional value they’re leveraging from Mimecast’s Archive for Teams, some are requesting support of additional data types, especially audio and video. As we invest in widening our capabilities, we’re also partnering with Theta Lake to provide an integrated, fully-supported solution for full capture, retention and automated risk identification for anything shared, shown, spoken, or typed in Zoom, Webex, Slack, RingCentral Office, LogMeIn, and other leading A/V collaboration platforms. That way, organizations can seamlessly integrate audio/video archiving and indexing into their Mimecast Cloud Archive infrastructure if they need it, without paying for it if they don’t.

Meanwhile, many organizations also rely on our best-in-class archiving solution as a foundation for backup, restore, and business continuity. Using Mimecast Sync and Recover, customers can address data recovery gaps associated with relying on Microsoft Office 365’s inadequate built-in capabilities, while also reliably backing up and restoring business-critical Exchange services, whether cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

Mimecast’s security products make extensive use of machine learning, so we have a strong understanding of what it can and can’t do. Today, in archiving-related applications, AI/ML primarily offers value for one financial services use case: compliance supervision. There, it can limit false positives generated by flagged words, potential policy violations, and other communications linked to transgressions such as money laundering and insider trading. That said, organizations have generally needed significant internal ML expertise to gain these benefits, so ML has been used in archiving primarily at very large firms, largely in financial services, though with mixed success.

That’s how it’s been, but it may not stay that way forever. So we’re actively investigating ways to bring ML to mainstream archiving, and deliver real value to customers without deep in-house ML expertise. That’s what we’ve always done: find ways to help more people get more value with less complexity. We think that’s why we keep winning awards – and, more important, keep delighting customers.

The Bottom Line

For the seventh consecutive year, Mimecast has earned a coveted Leader spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving. It’s a validation of what our enterprise information archiving teams have always sought to do: empower more people to get more business value more easily.