Infrastructures of potentially dozens of servers have built up around corporate email servers to provide better governance, reduced risk and improved legislative compliance - anti-virus, anti-spam, attachment handling, encryption, disclaimers, archiving and hot-standby mail servers to name a few.

These disparate email environments provide a fragmented approach to applying email policy and lack overall visibility of email threats. This traditional approach also impacts the quality of the evidence that can be provided by creating barriers to extracting information quickly and in a relevant format.

Mimecast's approach has always been to build a single web-based email management platform, rather than creating standalone technologies and attempt to integrate them. The entire Mimecast service abstracts the user from the underlying technologies involved and instead provides a service that offers strong chains-of-custody, constant availability, sub-second discovery and an infinite storage capability.

This white paper summarizes the author's experiences of litigating in fractured environments, particularly as they pertain to email. In light of these experiences it is the author's opinion that potential litigants are always best advised to gain control of their email systems and because email is a technological issue, this requires technological solutions.