The apparent exodus from Mimecast of late is reflected in our total number of customer archive migrations, equating to 43% in 2022 alone.
The trend has continued this year with customers citing determining factors, such as higher costs, reduced support and a more robust compliance toolset to meet regulatory demands. Key questions include how to future-proof email retention strategies and ensure security and compliance while minimising costs? Identifying legacy content and clearing out the ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial data) is essential to reduce costs, reduce migration timescales and work towards increased compliance with data retention policies.
When Mimecast first arrived on the scene, it was a game changer for email security, content preservation/archiving and eDiscovery. It offered enterprises much-needed control and insight into their stored content and allowed them to leverage cloud-based technologies.
The advent of cloud solutions disrupted the market for the better, with a great deal of business content created in collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint (outside the realms of Mimecast).
Mimecast may have been an option for early adopters of a cloud solution, but there are many good alternatives available to customers now.
Key stages in migration planning
- Define your business needs
Take time to outline your new needs in terms of content preservation and understand what is driven by compliance (security, retention and search) and what is driven by operations (business continuity, content accessibility, collaboration, storage management and backup).
What in-house resources are available for the project?
What is your approach to deploying the destination environment? - Consider the new target platform
Depending on business needs and risk profile, should you consider a specialist data archiving and eDiscovery solution, or can your needs be met by leveraging your production email solution (eg: Microsoft 365)? - Data extraction
One approach to get data out of Mimecast in bulk is to pay Mimecast by the GB for their mass export service. Not only is this an expensive option, lead times for the start of extractions performed by Mimecast can run to months. - Your data footprint will increase
Once your data is out of Mimecast, it will need to be stored somewhere, even on a temporary basis. To accurately plan for that expansion in both your interim storage and final destination, you need validated statistics on the anticipated extracted data footprint. - Exported data format
Mimecast exports data in zipped EML (email) format. That may need to be processed to convert and/or restructure it to confirm that all the necessary metadata is present and that it is in the correct format before it can be successfully ingested into your final destination. - Good reporting of data handling processes is critical
An audit trail of reports is often the only way to ensure that the content you requested has been delivered and can be validated as such. A full audit log is essential for investigating queries from users, security, chain of custody and compliance, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. - Ingestion preparation has a very real impact on success and a smooth migration
A Mimecast extraction is essentially a “data dump”. It often takes additional processing to ensure it is in a usable format and one that is compatible with onward ingestion into the proposed target solution. - There will be legacy content that doesn’t belong to an active email account
As well as containing large volumes of data associated with current, live users, most legacy archives will contain data relating to non-live users. Depending on business needs and the chosen destination platform, thought may be required as to how data associated with non-live users will be handled. - Transitioning users
The amount of planning for change management will depend on whether and how end users and legal teams will use the target platform. The smoothest transitions start before the migration to prepare users for how, why and when changes will happen, and then guiding them through the transition as it occurs. - Should you take everything?
Lots of customers decide to migrate literally everything from the point that their Mimecast journaling service became active. We recommend getting advice from your legal team on data retention policies to determine how far back you need to go, as it may not be as far back as you’ve been maintaining your journals. - Governance can be tricky
Being unable to separate email data by custodian makes it very difficult to apply records management policies on anything other than date. That means that shared folders are usually subject to blanket “longest retention date” policies. That puts organisations at risk of retaining some data for far longer than required (or possibly permitted). - Plan for the migration duration
Migrating data from Mimecast to an alternative destination is not going to happen overnight and access to a valid license is required for the duration. Planning well in advance of the license anniversary is key to avoid having to extend the Mimecast subscription.
Competitive archiving solutions now offer functionality that can easily rival Mimecast. Governance and compliance can be unified across all your business content, including email, files, chat, calls, archives and more. No forgotten workloads, no awkward gaps, no standards discrepancies and no duplication of effort across information silos, saving time and costs.
Retention policies can fit your exact regulatory and operational requirements. No more “catch it all, keep it all” mindset. Instead, storage and risk are minimised through precision retention that stores exactly what you need for exactly as long as you need it, essential for effective eDiscovery.
Whether storing, migrating or finding archived email content, TrueSwift can help reduce storage and maintenance costs and increase user transparency for compliance. As independent specialists, we are trained and accredited partners with most of the leading archive solutions, both on-premise and cloud.