Proofpoint's Next-generation Messaging Security Platform Delivers Dramatic
Performance Gains, Unified Policy Management and Data Loss Prevention
Enhancements
CUPERTINO, Calif. and WASHINGTON, June 4 /PRNewswire/ -- from Gartner
IT Security Summit 2007 -- Proofpoint, Inc., the leading provider of
integrated email security and data loss prevention solutions, today
introduced Proofpoint 5, its next-generation family of solutions. Based on
a new, integrated architecture, Proofpoint 5 is the industry's first
single-appliance solution for defending against inbound spam and viruses,
preventing leaks of confidential and private data, encrypting sensitive
information and analyzing messaging infrastructures. Delivering these
capabilities on a single platform enables customers to radically reduce
costs and complexity while improving the overall effectiveness of their
messaging security infrastructures.
"Proofpoint's appliance has performed flawlessly for us for the past 3
years, protecting our users from all types of email-borne threats," said
Bill Stephens, manager of electronic communication for the City of Topeka,
Kansas. "The performance enhancements in Proofpoint 5 will ensure that
we'll have plenty of headroom to handle rising email volumes, without
having to invest in new infrastructure. And the ability to deploy outbound
protection on the same platform will help us defend against future threats
as our needs change."
Proofpoint 5 delivers dramatic enhancements across the entire
Proofpoint platform -- which can be deployed as a hardware appliance,
virtual appliance or software -- with powerful administration features,
advanced data loss prevention capabilities and high-performance protection
against message-borne threats.
"Proofpoint 5 delivers a unique architecture and unified policy
management for both email security and data loss prevention," said Sandra
Vaughan, senior vice president of products and marketing for Proofpoint.
"Proofpoint 5 continues to raise the bar on performance, extending our lead
over the competition by delivering an appliance architecture that can
handle more than 10,000 simultaneous connections and process more than
400,000 messages per hour with both inbound and outbound protection
enabled. Proofpoint 5 offers an unbeatable combination of outstanding
ease-of-use, the industry's lowest total-cost-of-ownership and the most
flexible deployment options-including the industry's only enterprise-class
virtual appliance for email security."
Unified Appliance Architecture
Proofpoint 5 continues Proofpoint's track record of delivering
leading-edge, enterprise-class protection with extremely low total cost of
ownership. Powered by a new, unified appliance architecture, Proofpoint 5
delivers features that greatly simplify the creation and management of both
inbound and outbound messaging policies across email, HTTP and FTP
protocols while further reducing overall administration requirements.
The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway 5.0 family of physical and
virtual appliances delivers email security, multi-protocol data loss
prevention and policy-based encryption on a single platform. Administrators
can now dynamically control which services are enabled on each Proofpoint
appliance via Proofpoint's centralized, Web-based administration console.
Services can be deployed in almost any configuration, to meet each
organization's preferences, cost considerations and performance
requirements.
With Proofpoint 5, all of Proofpoint's modular defenses are managed
entirely from Proofpoint's graphical user interface, extending Proofpoint's
unified policy management framework to control even the most advanced
encryption and multi-protocol data loss prevention features:
-- Integrated, Multi-protocol Scanning: Proofpoint 5 makes it easier than
ever for enterprises to enforce security policies around email, HTTP
and FTP channels simultaneously. The Proofpoint Network Content Sentry
module -- which provides content filtering and data loss prevention
features for web and FTP protocols -- is fully integrated within
Proofpoint's administrative GUI and can be deployed on any standard
Proofpoint hardware appliance.
-- Integrated, Policy-based Encryption: The Proofpoint Secure Messaging
module is now fully integrated with the Proofpoint 5 platform and
requires no additional hardware to filter, route and encrypt messages.
Powered by the latest version of Voltage Security's IBE technology, it
automatically and dynamically encrypts outbound email based on
customizable policies, right at the email gateway. As a result,
encryption policies are accurately and consistently applied and end
users do not need to take any special actions to ensure that messages
are properly encrypted.
The new product is the first of its kind to offer fully integrated
email content filtering and policy-based encryption on a single, easy-
to-deploy appliance or virtual appliance.
As in previous versions, Proofpoint's unique automatic configuration
propagation, centralized message quarantine, centralized reporting
interface, GUI-based LDAP command console and full support for Microsoft
Active Directory integration simplify maintenance and reduce total cost of
ownership even further.
Advanced Data Loss Prevention
In addition to delivering the industry's most effective protection
against spam and virus attacks, Proofpoint 5 is also the fastest and
easiest way for organizations to prevent leaks of sensitive data via email,
Web and FTP protocols. Proofpoint's easy-to-deploy platform, pre-configured
data protection policies and easy-to-use administration console let
organizations deploy robust data loss prevention features in just minutes.
"The growing number of high profile incidents in which customer
records, confidential information, and intellectual property were leaked,
lost or stolen has created an explosive demand for solutions that protect
against the deliberate or inadvertent release of sensitive information,"
said Brian Burke, research manager for IDC's Security Products service.
"Proofpoint continues to deliver innovative solutions for information
protection and control. For example, Proofpoint's virtual appliance is an
early example of a new form factor for security appliances that IDC expects
to pick up steam over the next few years."
This new release extends Proofpoint's data loss prevention capabilities
with a variety of enhancements to help enterprises more easily protect
private information, defend against leaks of confidential information and
comply with data protection regulations. Advanced policy creation tools
reduce both administration and setup time, while enhancing detection
accuracy.
New Smart Identifiers, Dictionaries and Pre-configured Policies
The Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance(TM) module has been enhanced with
new "smart identifiers" to detect more types of critical information
out-of-the box, without requiring customization. Proofpoint's smart
identifiers offer higher accuracy than simple regular expressions, looking
not just for a certain pattern of characters, but also computing checksums
or performing other tests to confirm that numerical strings that appear to
be violations are truly protected information.
In addition, new managed dictionaries of financial services terms and
pre-configured rules simplify the process of ensuring compliance with SEC
rules, detecting trades of regulated securities or complying with PCI
guidelines.
Easier Management of Advanced Policies
Proofpoint's point-and-click policy creation interface has been
enhanced with new features that make it easier than ever to manage complex
or extremely fine-grained data loss prevention policies. Enhanced control
over policy hierarchies, support for policies with branching logic, flow
control modifiers and proximity detection algorithms can be used in both
the Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance and Proofpoint Digital Asset
Security(TM) modules.
More Powerful and Flexible Administration
Proofpoint 5 takes Proofpoint's renowned ease-of-use and powerful,
enterprise administration features to the next level with a new "Web 2.0"
inspired interface that offers advanced customization, reporting and
end-user controls.
"Proofpoint strikes the perfect balance between having the most
effective security features and being easy to administer," said Daryl
Smith, senior technical engineer for Mary Kay, Inc. "We're especially
looking forward to the enhanced reporting and alerting features of
Proofpoint 5 that will make it even easier to monitor our messaging
systems."
Configurable Administrative Interface with Web 2.0, Ajax-powered
Enhancements
With Proofpoint 5, administrators can easily create a personalized
"messaging command center" that gives instant access to their most used
reports and controls. An all-new, Ajax-based interface and library of
interface widgets allows drag and drop customization of the reports, status
information, RSS feeds and other components displayed by the Proofpoint
Messaging Security Console(TM) dashboard. Proofpoint's interface can also
be used to create "mashups" of information from other security applications
and third-party data sources.
Administrators can create any number of customized views for different
tasks or user roles, complete with customized levels of access control. For
example, email administrators may want to monitor spam and virus statistics
while compliance officers only need to monitor outbound policy violations
or regulatory compliance trends.
Proofpoint 5 also features an enhanced, more flexible alert
infrastructure that offers eaiser-to-understand system alerts, more control
over alert recipient lists and granular control over alert frequency.
Superior End-user Controls with Advanced Web-based Quarantine
The interface enhancements in Proofpoint 5 extend to end-users as well
as administrators. Enhanced end-user controls and a robust web-based
quarantine give users complete control over their messaging preferences.
Support for automatic authentication of users through Active Directory
makes this functionality easy for administrators to manage.
Enhanced Reporting
New reporting features make it easier for administrators to customize
and understand Proofpoint's built-in library of more than 50 reports.
Administrators can now "drill down" on all reports based on configurable
route information. For example, spam trends for a single department can be
easily displayed and analyzed or inbound versus outbound email volume
trends can be quickly compared. New domain-based reports can be generated
by Proofpoint managed service providers and ISP customers to generate
detailed reports for each of their hosted customers.
Extreme Performance Gains
Proofpoint 5 includes performance enhancements across all product areas
including message filtering speed, connection processing and user interface
responsiveness. These performance enhancements help preserve customer
investments in appliance and server hardware -- handling ever-increasing
email volumes without requiring new infrastructure -- and increasing the
productivity of both end users and administrators.
-- Throughput enhancements: New operating system, MTA (message transfer
agent) and message filter performance enhancements have been added to
help current Proofpoint deployments keep up with rising spam volumes. A
single Proofpoint appliance can now handle more than 10,000 concurrent
connections.
In addition, Proofpoint's recently-introduced email reputation service,
Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation(TM), can be used to block 80% or more of
inbound email connections without requiring any additional hardware.
The combined effect of these performance improvements allows Proofpoint
Messaging Security Gateway appliances to handle massive email volumes.
A single Proofpoint appliance can now process more than 400,000
messages per hour with all inbound and outbound filtering features
enabled.
-- Anti-spam performance: Proofpoint MLX(TM) machine learning technology
continually learns to fight the latest spam threats and is frequently
enhanced with new detection techniques. Updated versions of the
Proofpoint MLX anti-spam engine are continually delivered to customers
to ensure that their Proofpoint deployments always provide the highest
level of protection at all times.
Unlike other solutions, customers do not have to upgrade to new
versions of the Proofpoint platform to receive these enhancements.
During the month of May 2007, Proofpoint delivered higher than 99.6%
anti-spam effectiveness at all times, as measured against Proofpoint's
network of spam honeypots.
-- User interface enhancements: Proofpoint's Ajax-based interface provides
a high-performance, extremely responsive administrative interface that
performs even complex GUI-based tasks in just seconds.
Pricing and Availability
The Proofpoint Protection Server 5.0 software and Proofpoint Messaging
Security Gateway 5.0 hardware appliance and virtual appliance are available
now. Appliance pricing starts at $6,750 plus annual user license fees.
Proofpoint modules for anti-spam, anti-virus, secure messaging, data loss
prevention, advanced log analysis and multi-protocol policy enforcement are
priced separately.
Proofpoint 5 offers the ultimate in deployment flexibility and can be
deployed as a hardware appliance, virtual appliance, software or as a
hosted solution through Proofpoint's network of managed service providers.
Try Proofpoint: Free for 45 Days
Proofpoint offers a free, 45-day trial version of its breakthrough
virtual appliance for messaging security. Register to download your free
trial by visiting:
http://www.proofpoint.com/trial
About Proofpoint, Inc.
Proofpoint provides unified email security and data loss prevention
solutions for enterprises, universities, government organizations and ISPs
to defend against inbound threats such as spam and viruses, prevent leaks
of confidential and private information across all protocols, and encrypt
sensitive emails. Proofpoint's products are controlled by a single
management and policy console and are powered by Proofpoint MLX(TM)
technology, an advanced machine learning system developed by Proofpoint
scientists and engineers. Proofpoint provides the most scalable and
flexible deployment model including: hardware appliance, virtual appliance,
hosted services and software. For more information, please visit
http://www.proofpoint.com.
Proofpoint, Proofpoint MLX, Proofpoint Protection Server, Proofpoint
Messaging Security Gateway, Proofpoint Spam Detection, Proofpoint Smart
Search, Proofpoint Virus Protection, Proofpoint Zero-Hour Anti-Virus,
Proofpoint Content Compliance, Proofpoint Network Content Sentry,
Proofpoint Digital Asset Security, Proofpoint Secure Messaging and
Proofpoint Regulatory Compliance are trademarks, registered trademarks or
licensed trademarks of Proofpoint, Inc. All other trademarks contained
herein are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE Proofpoint, Inc.
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Related links:
http://www.proofpoint.com
CONTACT:
Andy Murphy of Davies Murphy Group,
+1-781-418-2408, pr@proofpoint.com, for Proofpoint, Inc.
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