Innovative AI Leader Manages Risk and Streamlines Operations With Proofpoint Email Security
The Challenge
- Protect organization from malware and threats
- Protect email domain and business reputation
- Minimize IT manual processes and gain email visibility
The Solution
- Proofpoint Secure Email Relay
- Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense
The Results
- Secures transactional email from internal applications and SaaS providers
- Improved email visibility improves compliance and IT efficiency
- DMARC provides domain-level protection of email channel
The Challenge
Meeting Internal and External Compliance Needs
A full-service partner trusted by 77% of U.S. hospitals, this AI leader creates a variety of intuitive products, such as voice recognition and workflow assistant solutions, that can help healthcare professionals streamline patient records and other daily tasks. Designed to amplify people’s ability to help others, its offerings support a wide range of industries. These include healthcare, financial services, retail and government customers.
Like every major enterprise, the company relies on email for collaboration, innovation and customer interaction. Balancing efficiency and security is a key responsibility of its IT security team. “Making sure that the mail flow is not interrupted is our primary job,” said the senior systems engineer at the company. “We ensure that email is delivered securely to its destination, whether it’s internal, external, incoming or outgoing.”
The company is continually reviewing and strengthening its security posture. This led them to add Proofpoint Email Fraud Defense (EFD) to the Proofpoint security platform they currently had in place. EFD provides guided workflows for enabling sender security and authentication, including establishing a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) policy to protect against sender impersonation by rejecting unauthorized emails that fail authentication.
“DMARC was a security initiative put forth by not only our company, but our customers and clients, who were requesting it in security reviews,” explained the principal engineer at the company. “But the project had stalled because we have a very complex organization with multiple divisions and departments that are sending on behalf of our brand.”
The company needed a solution to help it speed deployment of DMARC, and provide its stakeholders with a way to ensure that transactional emails sent from applications and third-party partners under its domain were properly authorized.
Senior systems engineer, leading AI company
The Solution
Maintaining the Integrity of Outbound Email
The company’s IT team chose to add Proofpoint Secure Email Relay to prevent its trusted domains from being abused by vulnerable apps or compromised email service providers. Secure Email Relay, combined with Email Fraud Defense, provided better visibility into their overall email processes for improved best practices.
“We had several divisions with their own data centers that managed servers, and they would just set up their own email services such as SendGrid or another SMTP relay, and send emails using our brand,” said the senior systems engineer. “We had no insight into those users setting up their own email servers. To get our company to a secure state, we had to provide them with a solution that allows them to continue their workflow, but through an authorized process.”
Proofpoint Secure Email Relay lets the company replace its disparate on-premises relays and ad hoc email services with a secure, cloud-based alternative.
“Our Proofpoint engineer was extremely helpful in making us understand what the solution is all about,” said the principal engineer. “We learned quite a bit from her, and it was a great experience.”
The Results
Protecting Users and Global Brand Reputation
Proofpoint Secure Email Relay has helped the company protect its domain from abuse and secure transactional email from its cloud providers.
“Proofpoint is doing its job very well,” said the principal engineer. “It has effectively filled the email security gaps that we had, and has really helped us.”
The solution also helped the company’s users be more productive. And it enabled the company’s IT team to meet its security and compliance objectives, streamlining its move to DMARC by enabling DKIM signing of emails prior to sending. Email Fraud Defense also simplified DMARC implementation, with Proofpoint consultants working closely with the company’s IT team to provide step-by-step recommendations throughout the process.
“Our users are happy with the solution because they receive a lot less spam,” said the senior systems engineer. “From the technical team’s perspective, implementing the DMARC p=reject policy helps ensure that we won’t have malware incidents, unless the attacks are very sophisticated.”
Moving to a cloud model has also helped the company free up time for its engineering team, so they can focus on other tasks.
“When we moved to the Proofpoint solution, there were a lot of benefits to not having to deal with the on-premises systems that we had to maintain and manage all the time,” said the senior systems engineer. “The uptime is nearly 100%, so we really don’t have to deal with outages. That’s important for me, because managing and upgrading those servers was quite a bit of work. I think that transition was one of the greatest things that has happened.”
The company’s IT team also appreciates the ongoing support from Proofpoint professionals who help the organization keep the solution optimized and up to date. The senior systems engineer is looking forward to continuing to partner with Proofpoint well into the future.
“With Proofpoint, we have peace of mind that things are in good hands,” said the senior systems engineer. “We have monthly security review calls to look at optimal configuration of Proofpoint solutions, discuss how to improve things, and make sure that we’re keeping up with the latest threats and vulnerabilities. Having a team support you, back you up, and be there is very important to us.”