The targeted attack protection that we use has been great, as has the email filtering and the rules that we have set for Proofpoint. The quarantine capabilities are very useful.
You can scale the solution.
It's a mature product. It does a good job in detection.
The false positives are an issue. There are many false positives that come in, which you report to Proofpoint. Sometimes they take time to update those things. They say there's an option that we can use to report false positives. However, it is not a quick remedy. You go and report it, and still, you have to take action on it and clear those emails getting blocked. It's too cumbersome.
We don't have the option to scan a password-protected attachment. I have to either blindly whitelist it as it will get blocked since an email with attachments normally gets scanned. We'd like to have some mechanism in place where we can scan these protected attachments or whitelist the domain.
I've been working with the solution for two years.
We purchased some licenses, and we are using all of them. For us, scalability is not a problem. We have been able to scale it.
We have more than 5,000 people working on the product.
Technical support is good. The expertise that they offer is good. The only thing that I have a problem with is we have our support operations in India and their availability for a call can be mismatched. That would normally take some time. You don't get a suitable person in the time zone available around the clock.
We did not previously use a different solution.
I was not there when it was deployed. We only manage at the application level.
We do not need that many admins to maintain it. We might need three or so. Most of the time, it's only checking on the blocked emails, which are actually good emails, and sometimes if there are investigations required and maintenance, they would handle those tasks. At a minimum, you need three, depending on the size of your organization. They would maintain it for the shift, for fixed operations hours, not on a rotational basis. You might have to put in more resources if you have rotational.
Depending upon your company's revenue, you can make up your mind about whether you want to invest that money or not. However, the offering is niche in the market today compared to other products, like Exchange Online Protections, which is an evolving product. It's growing. In contrast, Proofpoint has been around in the listing for quite some time, so they mature in terms of detection of suspicious emails and its email filtering system. Of course, while the pricing is rather fair, clients would always prefer to pay less.
I cannot speak to the exact price.
The price is fixed. It doesn't change according to companies. It gives you multiple package options, so you can pick what suits you.
You also get other add-on services, which if you've got a subject matter expert within Proofpoint, then you don't have to buy additional personnel from them to coordinate. You wouldn't need a customer success manager or somebody doing a health check for it. That might increase your cost.
Next time, if I get an opportunity to reapply for a license, I might think of removing some of the add-on services, which might reduce the cost or the overall price that we are paying today. I don't know the actual standalone product cost, meaning what would be the product cost alone. It's dealt with by our procurement team, or they can check with Proofpoint to see the product pricing.
I have cross-checked this solution with Defender right now. We're doing a cost-benefit analysis and seeing if it makes sense for us to use it at all or not.
I'm a customer and end-user.
We are using Proofpoint Essentials right now.
When you are an SME, every product company is trying to promote a product and sell it to you; however, if you don't know how it functions and its capability and effectiveness, then you probably end up buying what you need. Constantly evaluate any product you're buying. I've seen Proofpoint used in the last three companies that I worked with, so I have a lot of experience with this particular solution.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.