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Proofpoint: Email Security & Data Loss Prevention
April 3, 2008
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Proofpoint is a leading provider of integrated email security and data loss prevention solutions.
The US-based company began operations in the Asia Pacific just two years ago.
Proofpoint now protects over half a million mailboxes in the region.
The company recently established their ASEAN headquarters right here in Singapore.
Mr. David Habben (DH) is the Regional Manager for Proofpoint and first tells us that this relatively new company was founded with a different vision.
DH: The idea was that nobody in the industry really took a holistic view of email security. Vendors focused on either inbound email security or outbound security. So Proofpoint was founded with the idea that it should be a holistic view and everything should be combined into one security platform. And there is a whole generation of new technologies becoming available so we really wanted to leverage those new technologies as well. So the Proofpoint company was founded with that basis and in the last six years we now operate in approximately 30 countries around the world, and we are the fastest growing company in the space.
What accounts for the increasing demand for email and data security solutions?
DH: When we look at email, it’s best to divide it into two areas. And the first is inbound email security. This includes things like spam, viruses, and a few other different threats that can affect you in that regard. Now, the growth of spam is certainly ridiculously large. And the reason it’s growing is simply because people buy it. There’s a survey from BSA.org (Business Software Alliance) that quotes 44 percent of people in the UK and 41 percent of people in the United States have bought from spam. So what that means is that the spammers simply send us more email. Spam has grown 300 percent last year alone and in the first quarter of this year it doubled. And it simply reflects the economics at work. People buy it so they send it. And of course there’s the downside of that in that it is very disruptive in a work environment, a lot of it is pornographic in nature and so unacceptable in a quality working environment as well. So that’s the growth in that area and the need for tier-one solutions has been driven because of that growth in the volume of spam. The other side of the coin is outbound email security. And this focuses on protection of customer data such as credit cards, social security numbers, insurance information, as well as intellectual property like network diagrams, marketing plans, financial reports, etc. And within the Asian region, most of the growth in that area is driven out of the perceived brand damage from leaking that information, whereas in other jurisdictions in Europe and the United States, a lot of the growth is driven from actual government-imposed penalties on leaking customer information.
Can you tell us how Proofpoint’s technology works in terms of dealing with spam?
DH: Proofpoint has harnessed a new generation of technology, and it’s a machine learning technology. So it becomes an automated way of dealing with spam. So we collect millions and millions of spam samples everyday and we have an artificial intelligent learning engine that works out what is and what is not spam by itself. And in that sense, it is able to block spam, letting in good email, but without the system administrator having to do anything, which is a unique prospect for us. It’s been very successful and today we have what’s called effectiveness, the rate at which we block spam, we have the highest effectiveness in the industry.
Singapore has recently been selected as Proofpoint’s headquarters for the ASEAN region. Can you tell us why Singapore was chosen?
DH: There were a lot of variables when we looked at where we wanted to set up our Asian base of operation. And we looked at a number of cities and not just the traditional Hong Kong and Singapore links. We looked at quite a number of cities in the area but Singapore was a standout for a number of reasons. The first is its travel links and travel proximity. Because it is a regional office, travel is really critical. We have to be able to get around and Singapore offers an excellent environment in that sense. Its business environment is incredibly steady and stable. We don’t see major policy shifts and even in the dark days of recessions and crashes gone by, we saw steady state policy enforcement. And that was a key driver as well. But the last variable, and probably the most significant, was Singapore is a very sophisticated market in its own right. So there’s a lot of multinationals based here, a lot of domestic Singaporean companies operate in a multinational context as well. So as a market to itself, Singapore is quite large, particularly for a sophisticated product like Proofpoint. And for all those reasons combined, Singapore was an obvious choice for us.
For more information about the company and its products, visit www.proofpoint.com.
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