We at Proofpoint are happy to announce the acquisition of Socialware. Founded in 2009, Socialware is a leading player (along with Proofpoint’s Social Media and Compliance group) in the social media security and compliance market. Proofpoint capabilities built on the Nexgate platform combined with Socialware gives us the broadest and deepest social media security and compliance offering available today. The expertise, vision, customers, partnerships and resources of our combined organizations puts Proofpoint in a clear position to define the de-facto social media security and compliance market standard. This is also great news for Proofpoint customers, Socialware customers, and Proofpoint partners as there are a host of benefits for each of these groups.
Benefits to Proofpoint Customers
Proofpoint customers will benefit from strong complementary technologies and outstanding engineering expertise that Socialware brings to the table.
Complementary Technologies
Socialware has established a strong track record for meeting social media compliance needs for some of the largest financial service organizations in the world. As part of their focus on financial services, Socialware has developed sophisticated compliance workflow and profile management capabilities that are a perfect complement to Proofpoint solutions.
Expertise
The combined forces of Proofpoint and Socialware development teams forms the largest and most experienced team of social media security and compliance technologists in the world. This resource is positioned to drive product velocity and innovation for years to come.
Socialware Customer Benefits
Socialware customers also stand to benefit tactically by gaining access to complementary technologies, and strategically by gaining the support of a strong, stable organization with a long-term commitment to social media security and compliance.
Complementary Technologies
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Compliance Anywhere – Proofpoint’s social media compliance controls are applied via direct, API-level integration with social network platforms “in the cloud.” This means that regardless of how your employees access social accounts - from the office, on the road, or from their phone - compliance controls are consistently applied.
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Deep Social Linguistics Analysis – Proofpoint data scientists combine natural language processing and machine-learning techniques to more accurately identify high-risk content. Accurate detection is one of the keys to social media compliance solution ROI because it reduces the time that supervisors waste reviewing low-risk incidents.
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Inbound Risk Detection - In addition to identifying outbound compliance risks from employees, Proofpoint detects inbound risks from customers. One inbound risk example are customer complaints that must be tracked to meet FINRA compliance requirements. Other examples include credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and account credentials mistakenly posted by customers to customer service accounts.
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Discovery – Proofpoint continuously discovers and tracks all accounts representing your brand in social. This not only includes authorized accounts participating in formal social programs, but unauthorized accounts operating outside of management oversight or compliance review.
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Security and Fraud – Proofpoint identifies a host of social media security and fraud risks that target major brands in social media. These risks include fraudulent accounts, malware, phishing, and account hacks (hijacks).Financial service firms in particular are being targeted by these threats due to the high-value nature of the environment, and extensive investments in social infrastructure. In short, banks present many, high value targets.
Commitment
Socialware is now backed by a stable, public company with strong financial resources and a long-term commitment to social media security and compliance. Recognizing social media as a next-generation enterprise communication channel with fundamental security and compliance requirements, Proofpoint invested in Nexgate in October 2014. A little over a year later, Proofpoint has backed that investment by acquiring Socialware. Socialware customers can rest assured that Proofpoint is committed to safely enabling enterprise social media.
Socialware will be integrated into the Proofpoint Social Media Security and Compliance group and the combined team will continue to maintain Proofpoint’s leadership position in the social media security and compliance market.
Proofpoint Partner Benefits
A large part of our Proofpoint product success can be traced to strong partnerships with leading social media infrastructure providers like Hootsuite and Salesforce. Our partner ecosystem has recently expanded to include LinkedIn, Percolate, KPMG and Accenture. Partners will continue to be at the heart of our go-to-market strategy.
From a product perspective, our intention is to incorporate key new Socialware capabilities in areas like compliance workflow into our platform and make those functions accessible to partners via callable compliance APIs. We will not offer Socialware solutions to clients already engaged with a partner and will not competitively position Socialware solutions against any partner. We would also expect our partners to align with Proofpoint to ensure a positive experience for existing Socialware customers. Although Socialware currently offers compliant publishing for financial services, we will always enable our partner ecosystem to offer best-of-breed publishing and content creation that integrates with Proofpoint security and compliance.
Proofpoint partners, with certified integration to our social media compliance APIs, will be offered preferential status within any Socialware customer opportunities. We are excited to work with our current strategic partners: Hootsuite, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Percolate to align our roadmaps and value propositions to serve the needs of Socialware customers as they become Proofpoint customers as well.
For more information on Proofpoint social media security and compliance solutions, please visit Nexgate solutions
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