Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions

Digital communications governance and archiving vendors continue to innovate to keep pace with the complexity of enterprise communications tools and governance demands. Heads of I&O should use this research to identify vendors that can best support their communications governance and compliance risk strategy.

Market Definition

Gartner defines digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) solutions as designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance, and derive insights from an evolving number of digital communications tools utilized by organizations. For the various communications tools in use across the enterprise, DCGA solutions enable consistent policy management and enforcement, reveal new data insights, and provide reporting capabilities of their use.

Organizations utilize DCGA solutions to proactively manage, monitor, collect and archive communications content. They are critical to an organizations’ efforts to meet a growing number of regulatory compliance mandates and an expanding scope of organizational communications governance and data insights.

Compliance requirements include monitoring, oversight, audits and investigations for regulated industries such as financial services and health sciences. They also extend to investigation requirements of the public sector to respond to public records requests. Corporate governance requirements include employee conduct and handling of sensitive data in the use of digital communication tools.

DCGA solutions are also emerging as a valued source of insights to utilize communications data as part of data and analytics efforts. They can enrich communications data to reveal operational and behavioral insights, such as enterprise intelligence, employee experience, misconduct risks and industry-specific assessments. They also provide advanced reporting and API capabilities, including integration with third-party data and analytics tools.

The DCGA market aligns to three vendor categories. These include vendors that develop archive- and platform-integrated solutions, which capture and analyze communication channels; vendors that focus on monitoring communications, such as supervision and surveillance use cases; and those that solely develop communications connectors to a variety of communications tools used by enterprises. As part of their direct integration and ability to centralize access to communications data, DCGA solutions facilitate multiple use cases such as archiving, search, supervision, surveillance, investigations, user governance and data analytics and insights.

While email remains a primary communications channel in the scope of DCGA solutions, there are multiple types of communications channels to be factored into a governance strategy, including text-, voice- and video-based content. The scope of these communications tools is constantly changing as new messaging applications are frequently introduced to the market and adopted by employees. Recent evidence suggests that enterprise organizations’ customers are dictating the communications tool of choice.

Report 2025

Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report here and view the magic quadrant graphic here.

Market Status	Market Vendor
Leader	Global Relay
Leader	Smarsh
Leader	Proofpoint
Leader	Archive360
Leader	Arctera
Leader	Mimecast
Visionary	Theta Lake
Visionary	Shield
Visionary	Behavox
Visionary	LeapXpert
Niche Player	Bloomberg
Niche Player	SteelEye
Challenger	Microsoft
Challenger	NICE