Proofpoint Data Security vs. SSE Vendors

Proofpoint Data Security vs. SSE Vendors

Level up from security service edge vendors’ DLP solutions to Proofpoint’s unified data security

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Overview

Protect your sensitive data with Proofpoint

Don’t settle for the limited capabilities of security service edge (SSE) vendors’ DLP solutions that lack insider risk visibility and email threat correlation. Proofpoint’s human-centric data security uniquely combines the context of user behavior with content-related enforcement telemetry, protecting both data in motion and data at rest. With this adaptive and comprehensive approach, you can pinpoint risk more accurately, accelerate investigations and prevent disruptions to end-user productivity.

of Fortune 100 companies rely on Proofpoint to safeguard their sensitive information

users are protected by Proofpoint

customers trust Proofpoint as their strategic data security partner

Why Proofpoint

Why choose Proofpoint?

SUPERIOR DETECTION AND PREVENTION

Proofpoint’s human-centric, multichannel data security addresses both data loss and insider risk use cases, so you can stop more threats and investigate incidents faster.

EFFICIENT DATA SECURITY OPERATIONS

Proofpoint’s single-agent, single-console solution provides comprehensive visibility, rich context and advanced analytics and automation capabilities, so you can focus on strategic initiatives instead of investigating false positives.

COST SAVINGS

With Proofpoint, you can create a superior DLP program while saving up to 50% in license fees compared to the cost of SSE solutions.

Visibility into user behavior

SSE vendors’ DLP solutions are exclusively content-centric. They prioritize protection of files and classify data without considering human behavior or intent. The best user insight SSE vendors can provide is about a user’s activity across the network, which is insufficient to effectively address insider threat scenarios. Consequently, SSE vendors’ DLP solutions can both miss insider threats and mislabel benign events as incidents.

Proofpoint’s human-centric approach adds deep insight into user intent. With Proofpoint’s content- and context-based rules, you can more easily understand if a user whose actions trigger a DLP alert is compromised, malicious or negligent. Consequently, you can detect threats sooner, and drastically reduce the number of false positives and false negatives.

Account takeover detection and remediation

SSE vendors’ DLP solutions lack a secure email gateway offering. Since most attacks begin with email, their visibility into account takeovers is limited.

Proofpoint natively integrates its best-in-class secure email gateway into its data security solution, providing comprehensive visibility across the entire account takeover attack chain—from threat infiltration to data exfiltration. As a result, you can effectively detect, investigate and respond to account takeover attacks and tie them to DLP events.

Prevention of email misdelivery and accidental data exfiltration

SSE vendors’ DLP only provide rules-based email DLP and cannot prevent users from inadvertently sharing sensitive data by mistyping an email address, attaching the wrong file, or sending an email to an unauthorized recipient.

Proofpoint employs artificial intelligence (AI) to understand the relationship between senders and recipients, as well as the content they normally share. When Proofpoint detects suspicious data exfiltration attempts via email, it prompts users to confirm they are sending the content to the correct person, preventing misdelivery.

Native integration with existing email flows

SSE vendors offer limited email DLP via an additional outbound mail hop to a DLP service. For additional email security, SSE vendors require a separate message scanning solution, adding architectural complexity and latency.

Proofpoint applies outbound email DLP and encryption inline with email flows, ensuring fast performance and maximum reliability.

Infrastructure independence

SSE vendors’ DLP offerings are tied to their own platforms. If a customer using an SSE vendor’s DLP capabilities decides to switch to a different SSE provider, they would need to rip and replace their entire DLP tooling, adding additional costs and retraining for administrators and end users alike.

Proofpoint’s data security solutions are infrastructure-agnostic, so they will work with the infrastructure of your choice, protecting your investment. Further, you won’t need to replace your Proofpoint tools should you decide to change your infrastructure provider, ensuring uninterrupted and reliable information security.

Realize business value with a true data security platform

Features/Tools/Products	Proofpoint	SSE Vendors

Adaptive DLP policy based on user risk	Yes	No
No reliance on infrastructure or traffic steering	Yes	No
File lineage—visual tracking of data across multiple channels	Yes	No
No upcharge for advanced DLP classifiers, IDM and EDM	Yes	No

Single, lightweight, infrastructure-agnostic user-mode agent	Yes	No
Granular DLP controls on managed devices for USB, copy/paste, network, print, AirDrop and Bluetooth	Yes	No
Coverage of both DLP and insider risk use cases	Yes	No

Adaptive, multichannel, comprehensive solution for insider threat management and DLP	Yes	No
Expert professional and managed services	Yes	No
Integrated security awareness training	Yes	No

Visibility and prevention of account takeover attacks originating from email	Yes	No
Single, gateway-integrated SMTP hop for outbound email DLP	Yes	No
Recipient-based DLP encryption	Yes	No
Adaptive email DLP/misdirected email prevention	Yes	No
Ability to rewrite URLs for inbound email messages	Yes	No

Large library of insider threat use cases	Yes	No
Quick time-to-value with large, insider threat library and granular, customizable rules	Yes	No
Visual evidence with screenshots of user activity	Yes	No
Correlated DLP and ITM activity with AI-driven analytics	Yes	No

Timeline view of user and data events with customizable explorations	Yes	No
One-click remediation with integrated DSPM	Yes	No
Risk triage with human risk correlation across platform including email threat telemetry	Yes	No

The Proof

Customers recognize Proofpoint’s market leadership

Proofpoint is the proven leader.

Despite recent acquisitions, Cisco has not made major enhancements or innovations to close the identified gaps in their security capabilities. Their customer support continues to suffer, while they continue to rely heavily on third parties and OEM relationships.

Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice 2024

More Reasons

Holistic data security platform

Proofpoint’s human-centric cybersecurity platform can help future-proof your organization by consolidating your discrete IT security controls in critical areas, such as impersonation protection, account takeover protection, security awareness training, and email archiving and compliance.

SSE vendors’ core competency is in infrastructure, an important element of the enterprise cybersecurity toolkit. SSE vendors’ DLP offerings, however, are an afterthought. Bolted onto an SSE platform, they only provide basic capabilities and are inherently restricted by the SSE solution’s architecture. With limited experience in data security, SSE vendors don’t provide relevant managed services or end-user training.

In contrast, the Proofpoint solution is purpose-built for data security. It delivers the people, processes and technology needed for a successful enterprise data security program. ZenGuide™, Proofpoint security awareness training, helps you create a security-first culture in your organization. With Proofpoint Premium Services, you can leverage highly skilled experts to help design, implement and manage your DLP program. And Proofpoint’s unified platform enables you to protect data in motion across all channels and data at rest in cloud and on-premises file stores while solving data loss and insider risk use cases from a single console.

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