Businessweek

Proofpoint, Inc. operates as a security-as-a-service vendor that enables large and mid-sized organizations worldwide to defend, protect, archive, and govern their sensitive data. The company’s security-as-a-service platform includes an integrated suite of on-demand data protection solutions, including threat protection, regulatory compliance, archiving and governance, and secure communication. The company addresses four primary problems for the enterprise, such as keeping malicious content out; preventing the theft or inadvertent loss of sensitive information, and in turn, ensuring compliance with regulatory data protection mandates; collecting, retaining, governing, and discovering sensitive data for compliance and litigation support; and sharing sensitive data with customers, partners, and suppliers. Solutions The company provides a multi-tiered security-as-a-service platform consisting of solutions, platform technologies, and infrastructure. Its platform includes four solutions bundled for the convenience of its customers, distributors, and resellers, such as Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, and Proofpoint Enterprise Governance. Proofpoint Enterprise Protection Proofpoint Enterprise Protection is the company’s communications and collaboration security suite designed to protect customers' mission-critical messaging infrastructure from outside threats, including spam, phishing, unpredictable email volumes, malware, and other forms of objectionable or dangerous content before they reach the enterprise. Primary capabilities within Proofpoint Enterprise Protection comprise: Threat Detection: Uses the company’s Proofpoint MLX machine learning technology and reputation data to examine millions of possible attributes in every message, including envelope headers and structure, embedded Web links, images, attachments, and sender reputation, as well as unstructured content in the message body, to block phishing and spear phishing attacks, spam, and other forms of malicious or objectionable content. This solution also includes policy and routing controls designed to ensure security and handling various classifications of content. Virus Protection: Combats email-borne viruses, worms, and trojans with a solution that combines message handling, reporting, and policy management with major third-party anti-virus scanning engines. Zero-hour Threat Detection: Protects enterprises against new phishing attacks, viruses, and other forms of malicious code during the critical period after new attacks are released and before information is available to characterize the threat. Smart Search: Offers an interface that provides real-time visibility into message flows across an organization's messaging infrastructure, using built-in logging and reporting capabilities with message tracing, forensics, and log analysis capabilities. Targeted Attack Protection: Protects enterprises against persistent threats, such as phishing and other targeted email attacks using big data analysis techniques to identify and apply additional security controls against suspicious messages and any associated links to the Web. Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy The company’s data loss prevention, encryption, and compliance solution defends against leaks of confidential information, and helps ensure compliance with common U.S., international, and industry-specific data protection regulations, including the Health Care Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act; and the Payment Card Industry Security Standard Council's Data Security Standards. Primary capabilities within Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy comprise: Advanced Data Loss Prevention: The company’s advanced data loss prevention solution identifies regulated private content, valuable corporate assets, and confidential information before it leaves the organization through email, Web-based applications, or its Secure Share solution. Pre-packaged smart identifiers and dictionaries detect a range of regulated content, suc