Mimecast Alternatives: The Definitive Guide to Secure Email Archive Migration

When it comes to migrating to a new cloud platform, there are two primary options available to you. One is adopting the seeming simplicity and one-size-fits-all use model of a SaaS (Software as a Service) archiving solution like Mimecast, Global Relay, or Smarsh. The other, more secure option is to migrate your archives to your own public cloud tenant and choose which archiving or information management solution and security capabilities address your business and IT needs the best.

Archive Migration Option 1: Software-as-a-Service

If you’re looking for a more secure and flexible Mimecast alternative, migrating your archive to a hyperscale public cloud you control is the most future-ready option.

With platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), you maintain ownership of your data, store files in their native format, and apply your organization’s specific security protocols. This eliminates costly data extractions, avoids vendor lock-in, and ensures long-term access.

Unlike traditional SaaS platforms, cloud-native archives empower you to use advanced tools like AI and machine learning for automated classification, eDiscovery, and proactive supervision—capabilities that are increasingly essential for modern compliance and legal demands.

These powerful features are difficult or even impossible to achieve with a Mimecast archive or other first-generation SaaS platforms, which often rely on outdated infrastructure and limit your visibility and control.

Benefits of Controlling Your Own Public Cloud Archive

Unlike SaaS solutions like Mimecast, your own cloud archive offers complete flexibility, ownership, and visibility—without vendor lock-in or legacy limitations. Here’s what you gain:

1. Immediate access to your data in its native format 
2. Full control of where data is stored for data sovereignty
3. Complete, customizable control over security, compliance, and privacy 
4. Flexibility and on-demand scalability – use only what you need
5. Reduced upfront investment and predictable ongoing costs – CapEx versus OpEx
6. The ability to move your data out of the archive without ransom fees
7. Faster, scalable eDiscovery searches and case management, as well as customizable retention/disposition policy controls for regulatory compliance
8. Access to the latest AI and ML technology for auto-data classification, data mining, and analysis
9. The ability to granularly search and review content within audio, video and social media files

Archive Migration Option 2: Software-as-a-Service

Software-as-a-Service is just another way of talking about the cloud, right? Wrong. While SaaS offerings like Mimecast do share some similarities with traditional cloud services (they’re both subscription-based and delivered over the internet, for example), SaaS was around long before the cloud. As a result, SaaS services suffer from the same legacy issues that most businesses are trying to step away from.

Whereas hyperscale clouds, like those provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, enable you to run your own datacenter in the same way you would on-premises (but without the associated infrastructure or maintenance costs) SaaS vendors still rely on old school, third party-managed co-located data center technology.

What does that mean in reality? Your data is hosted on someone else’s infrastructure that:

• Can’t be customized for your business.
• Can’t readily adapt to harness the latest tech.
• Can’t dynamically scale infinitely as your business needs grow. 
• Can’t adopt your more secure security protocols.
• Can’t do intelligent data management like properly replicate data globally for disaster recovery purposes and compliance requirements.

That’s a lot of “can’ts” for a SaaS service that comes at such a cost.

SaaS Archive Limitations: No Control Over Your Security 

You’re prepared to invest in your move to the cloud in the same way you’ve spent significantly on security. So why would you let one investment undermine the other?

That’s just what happens if you use a SaaS vendor archiving solution like Mimecast. Because SaaS is based on a one-size-fits-all model, there’s no room for the unique security footprint you’ve spent time and money on developing to meet the precise needs of your business. In the same way, SaaS doesn’t offer you the control, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud, it restricts your options when it comes to security too.

With Mimecast, you have little or no say over the security model in place, the datacenter used, or the background checks carried out on employees. Even your company’s encryption keys are held by the platform, not your own IT or IT security department – the major issues many CISOs have. You just have to accept that your choices are limited and spend time and effort adapting your policies to match what you’re given.

SaaS Vendors Like Mimecast Limit Your Control Over Key Security Functions

Of course, moving to the cloud requires you to adapt your policies too, but these limitations become especially problematic when the provider cannot align with your security model. Here's where SaaS solutions like Mimecast fall short: 

1. Threat detection 
2. Identity management
3. Application security analysis
4. Firewall and firewall rules
5. Cloud-native directories 
6. Employee background checks

Of course, moving to the cloud requires you to adapt your policies too, but, if your entire technology footprint will exist in a SaaS third-party cloud, it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is adding a new provider that can’t align with your policies.

Instead, it means creating new lexicons and exceptions for a single third-party solution, creating potential conflicts between IT and security, privacy, and compliance teams, plus wasting stakeholder time with additional meetings, approvals, and signoffs. And, if the worst happens, will you really be able to say you did all you could to protect your data if you didn’t have control of a significant part of your archiving processes?

You understand the importance of these policies when it comes to keeping your business safe, so why would you choose a provider whose core business doesn’t revolve around security and who isn’t equipped to quickly respond to new and emerging threats?

Unlike SaaS vendors, major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft spend tens of millions every year to stay ahead of the game when it comes to cybersecurity. Their business depends on it, which is why they deploy cutting-edge tech to protect their customers (and their customers’ data). Additionally, because of the specialized regulatory requirements placed on each industry, the ability to add additional security protocols to your company’s own cloud tenancy is now a must-have for security professionals.

SaaS Archive Limitations and Data Sovereignty Challenges

Tied to security and compliance is the issue of data sovereignty. Where does your data reside, and where is it legally allowed?  You must always know where your data is stored. Government regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require that customer data remain in its country of origin, and internal policies restrict access to data by foreign entities. [listen to the latest in GDPR privacy regulations in EP 22 of our podcast]

Mimecast has quite a few data centers for SaaS providers. However, it can’t begin to match the global scale of cloud vendors such as Microsoft and Amazon. Regardless of how many data centers they have, SaaS solutions often require you to pick a single region and stick with it, offering no room for flexibility as regulations shift or your business expands into new territories.

Even when SaaS vendors offer the option to choose different storage locations, many struggle to support it effectively—often requiring multiple archives and limiting your ability to centrally manage data across regions.  For businesses that need to store customer and employee data within specific countries, this could be a deal-breaker.

By choosing a dedicated SaaS model like Archive360,your data resides in your organization's cloud tenancy. And you retain the flexibility to select one or multiple storage locations offered by your cloud provider—adapting easily to meet compliance requirements or enable effective disaster recovery. Even when stored across regions, your data remains searchable through federated search. This flexibility is only possible in hyperscale clouds, giving you full control over your data's protection and compliance. Microsoft has even sued the U.S. government multiple times to safeguard customer data privacy, underscoring the platform's security.

How SaaS Archives Like Mimecast Restrict Data Accessibility

It’s easy to assume that data archives store information in its original form, ready for you to access whenever needed. While that’s certainly the case with Archive360,  it’s often not true for SaaS vendors. Many of them ‘wrap’ each individual file—like an email—in a proprietary format that limits compatibility and forms the backbone of their data management systems. This outdated approach may have once offered advantages, but today it creates serious data accessibility challenges—and it's something worth asking a SaaS provider like Mimecast to explain.

However, whether through the use of these proprietary formats or SaaS-specific processes in general, one issue is constant – data can only be accessed via the vendor’s SaaS GUI, with little or no API access, effectively blocking visibility for the teams that need access to the data and limiting your freedom to move to another cloud archive. 

In the early days of email archiving—when the focus was on reducing storage use, meeting basic regulatory requirements, or supporting eDiscovery—simple keyword searches were the norm.

Today, next-generation cloud archives are essential for analytics, internal investigations, and audits, helping teams to seek out privacy compliance violations and insider threats, or extract actionable insights. Now, data stored in their native format is required to fully utilize machine learning and AI.

There are many powerful tools that help organizations unlock essential insights from their archived data. But most of these tools aren’t compatible with SaaS archives due to vendor lock-in and limited data accessibility—making it harder to gain real value from your information. 

Archive360’s Dedicated SaaS: Who Really Delivers on Data Accessibility?

While SaaS vendors often lock your data behind proprietary interfaces, Archive360’s cloud-native model ensures open, secure, and native-format access. Here's how Archive360 puts full data accessibility back in your hands: 

1. Analyze data using additional cloud-based tools
2. Access and view files (and metadata) in their native formats 
3. Carry out industry-specific compliance and security investigations and audits

To fully leverage cloud capabilities and avoid SaaS limitations, your data must remain securely accessible—not locked inside a third-party, legacy SaaS solution. Unlike hyperscale cloud platforms, most SaaS vendors rely on outdated archiving models that struggle to meet today’s evolving regulatory, security, and data management requirements.