Proofpoint Essentials Reviews

My overall experience with Proofpoint Essentials has been very positive. I use the platform daily as an administrator, and it has been reliable, easy to manage, and effective at protecting our organization from email-based threats. It provides good visibility into the email activity and gives me the tools that I need to investigate and manage the security issue efficiently. It catches the threat in real-time and blocks the spam or the phishing email in real-time.

We have provided a number of emails coming through on a day-to-day basis. I was experienced with this yesterday regarding the phishing email that came from the unknown domain, and Proofpoint Essentials blocked it. A specific scenario on that use case is that the domain has been coming to the attachment and that attachment on the email has a phishing link. When the users clicked on that link, it routed to a different domain which is trying to do credential theft when they are trying to reach out to that domain. Proofpoint Essentials blocked it, saying the threat appears to be phishing, and we blocked the domain. We got the error message from Proofpoint stating it is a credential harvesting attack. They stopped the threat before any user tried to reach out to the website.

Proofpoint Essentials addresses the important email security challenges, including phishing, spam, malicious attachment, suspicious link, impersonation attack, unwanted email, and business email compromise attack. It also gives the administrator better visibility into the message delivery and the filtering decision, which helps with troubleshooting and the security investigation.

Proofpoint Essentials will address several issues on a day-to-day basis because we have a mid-size to large-size company and every day we have thousands and millions of emails coming in and going outbound. It is a pretty frequent traffic on the internet. Proofpoint Essentials helps us to address several important email security challenges. The gateway needs to be secure, including phishing, spam, attachments, suspicious link, impersonation attack, business email compromise attack, and unwanted email. It will block at the gateway before it reaches the user's inbox. It also gives us, particularly as an energy company in the manufacturing industry, the ability to reduce email-based threats which is especially important for us because phishing and account compromise can create a significant operational and security risk. Before it reaches the user inbox, Proofpoint blocks it, and the administrator gets visibility on those threats.

From my standpoint, the main strengths of Proofpoint Essentials are its strong spam filtering, phishing protection, malicious URL and attachment detection, quarantine management, and message tracking capabilities. It helps reduce the number of unwanted and potential malicious emails reaching the user while giving the administrator good control over the policy and the email security. I will prioritize the spam filtering and phishing protection.

From my standpoint, Proofpoint Essentials works overall well, but there are a few areas that need to be improved. I would want to see more advanced reporting, including better searching and message tracing capabilities. In addition to that, I would want more threat context when investigating suspicious emails. Some administrator workflow could be made more intuitive and streamlined to make investigation faster.

The user interface is pretty straightforward. If any new user comes and joins the organization, they can easily learn Proofpoint Essentials. The only improvement needed from my standpoint is the reporting side, because that goes to the management level and leadership level for the visibility on what is going on in our email security. We have limited options on the reporting.

I have been using Proofpoint Essentials in my current job and my previous job, so I have around five to seven years of experience with Proofpoint Essentials.

The stability and availability are at 99.99%. Proofpoint Essentials is a stable solution.

We are a growing company. We do not have any issue while we are growing and working with Proofpoint Essentials. When we grow, we just need to increase the licensing, but from a scalability perspective, we do not have any issues working with Proofpoint Essentials.

I would say four out of five. When I open up the ticket, somebody from the APAC will try to reach out to us within 24 hours. Support is pretty responsive according to the prioritization and severity of the ticket.

I would say the governance and the security are pretty impressive and what we are looking for in email security as a first-time buyer. When we were implementing the system, the initial setup was a pretty straightforward process. The system is easy to maintain, and there was documentation and configuration options for the transition into the platform, which is relatively smooth. According to the governance standpoint, we are getting the reports that we need right now, and it is secure and is 100% compliant to our current framework.

I am currently the administrator for Proofpoint Essentials. When we onboarded it, the lift and shift required a couple of engineers. For the return on investment, we invested in a handful of licenses, around 500. Only a few employees, or I would say one full-time employee, will take care of the product. Lift and shift required a couple of engineers at the first place and then after that, only one full-time employee can look into the issue if there is a rise in the future.

So far, we have had positive feedback. We got around 40 to 45% return back as a security standpoint because on a day-to-day basis, cybersecurity hacks and email security hacks are artificial intelligence-based. Proofpoint Essentials is scanning those emails in real-time, stopping the attack. This will get us money back as an ROI standpoint.

Proofpoint Essentials is for mid-sized organizations, ranging from 500 to 1,000 people. It is a pretty significant product, and it is easy to integrate. We are going with 500 licensing for the initial setup. When we are growing, we are going to increase our license model. The pricing is reasonable for any mid to mid-size company. Pricing is not an issue for us, and it is budget-friendly.

Barracuda and MS 365.

Proofpoint Essentials is a great product to use for the mid-size to large company. I would recommend this to those who have employees between 500 to 700, as this is a good product to choose. Onboarding is pretty straightforward. After lifting and shifting, Proofpoint Essentials also helps us to set up those onboarding requirements. After that, we can only look out for some maintenance issues that you can handle by yourself or your team can manage those requests. I will highly recommend this product to any new user or purchaser. I have given this review a rating of 9 out of 10.

Our primary use case is for anybody who has Microsoft Office as an additional filtering security encryption purpose. We utilize it for all of the said functions that it provides.

The primary benefit for our organization is we have it set up to receive digests rather than being notified of every single spam or potential quarantined message. You can simply receive those and review them very easily in a single interface. Unlike other programs that are out there, it is multiple tabs waiting for it to load and it can be quite cumbersome. This is all in one central location for ease of use.

I really like the email encryption and archiving feature because when you are talking about legal holds it is very helpful in case somebody departs the organization. Those items are retained indefinitely.

The is some confusion that happens in the initial setup and configuration when you are configuring lists in Microsoft Office as well as the connectors. If it could be built into an enterprise application that could work much more smoothly with Microsoft Office or Azure Enterprise applications, that would be a great asset.

I have been using Proofpoint Essentials for the past eight years.

The stability is excellent and we have not experienced any issues or problems with it compared to other products such as AppRiver.

You can do a thirty-day trial on scalability with all of the key features or products included and it is excellent. We have around three hundred users that can use the solution.

We have reached out to customer support a couple of times about simple questions and concerns and honestly, they are great.

Positive

We previously tested out a couple of other platforms. We tried, if I am not mistaken, Barracuda and AppRiver, and we switched simply because of consistent uptime without any issues.

We work with deployment in the evenings or on weekends to minimize downtime. Once we have access to the domain itself and we input the DNS or the MX records in the DNS to create a connector and then the exceptions themselves, it is a relatively simple process. If you have access to all of the tools, it takes about two hours from start to finish.

It has definitely made users review their quarantine items and be more cautious when items that come through are questionable. End-user security is always a concern whenever you are dealing with people.

The pricing is comparable to Defender. It is correct, and there are no surprises. The different tiers that they offer, are all scalable.

Prepare for some downtime, but make sure you have access to everything before you start to implement this because it does take time for the MX records to be properly updated. But once that is done, everything else from there and double-checking your settings is usually the hardest thing you have to do. There is a long list of exceptions for the connectors that you have to create for Proofpoint.
I would rate Proofpoint Essentials an eight out of ten.