Achieving Compliance with ProofPoint E-mail Security Solutions

If you're looking for a scalable e-mail solution, Proofpoint's e-mail security services and solutions may be your best bet. Proofpoint's advanced, rich feature set offers enterprise-class scanning to medium and large-sized organizations. The product is consistent across all avenues of deployment, whether it be hosted, purchased as an appliance, or installed on your physical/virtual server. A company that whole-heartedly supports application deployment in the virtual sense can be a very valuable partner in today's businesses.

Proofpoint acts as a "man-in-the-middle," accepting e-mails from servers around the world into their solution. A myriad of events can be performed on the e-mail, such as stripping or banning attachments, monitoring for keywords, scanning for malware and verifying that your e-mail server actually has an account for the recipient. After scanning, e-mails are delivered to your e-mail servers for retrieval.

I approached Proofpoint about their hosted service for three distinct reasons. First, I don't have to purchase, maintain and update any hardware. If I add 10,000 users to the solution, it's as simple as a phone call. Second, Proofpoint will queue your mail in the event of an e-mail server outage. While most outages result in bounce messages that can delay mail for days, Proofpoint's queueing insures that all messages are delivered immediately upon restoration of services. Third, Proofpoint does all my disaster recovery planning for me. With data centers in various locations around the world (you can limit your data to a particular geographic area, if that's a concern), a major power or data outage in an wide area of the country ensures that their services never stop receiving and scanning your organization's e-mails.

Proofpoint scans incoming mails using F-Secure, a widely known antivirus solution. Scanning within multiple layers of archives is possible, and threats cleverly disguised as legitimate attachments are blocked. The E-mail Firewall features allows the administrator to fine-tune spam detection and create custom rules.

While Proofpoint's threat scanning capabilities are solidly reliable, they're not the greatest feature of the solution. Those lie in the feature modules that can be licensed additionally.

Proofpoint on Demand can help assure the privacy and security of the members of your organization using three different types of flexible, customizable features:

• Content Compliance - ensure that messages adhere to size, attachment, encryption and language policies.
• Regulatory Compliance - scan outbound e-mails for sensitive information such as financial information, health records and confidential personal information
• Digital Asset Security - Proofpoint's software will scan data sources that you deem sensitive and check outbound messages for leaks of that data
• E-mail Archiving - archive messages for future retrieval, reducing tape library space and expense
• Encryption - when outbound messages violate a policy or contain sensitive information, encryption ensures that the recipient receives the message in a secure, encrypted and easy-to-retrieve fashion

While I'm sure that Proofpoint on Demand has some shortcomings for some organizations, it is an excellent fit for most. Offering all of these great services on a broad range of platforms, Proofpoint has proved that it can be a leader in the e-mail security realm. Proofpoint will remain ahead of the pack as long as it continues to offer a comprehensive feature set and excel in perfecting each aspect of their offerings.