Bringing Information Governance and Archiving Together: New Live Webinar, March 14th

Information governance takes center stage as our live web seminar series continues on March 14, 2012 with "Manage and Govern Your Corporate Data - Wherever it Lives." Proofpoint archiving and governance experts Andres Kohn and Darren Lee will be joined by analyst Mike Osterman to discuss the business drivers behind information governance and the benefits of combining governance and archiving solutions to address a variety of regulatory and legal risks.

If you've been curious about the new Proofpoint Enterprise Governance solution, and the technology behind it, this is also a great opportunity to learn about what it does, how it works and how your organization can benefit.

All three of our speakers are terrific presenters and, as always, we'll save time to take your live questions. Registrants will also receive a link to a replay of the live event.

To register, visit this link - Manage and Govern Your Corporate Data - Wherever it Lives - or simply complete the form below:

 

Live this Wednesday: Mitigating Security Concerns about Cloud Archiving and eDiscovery

Our live web seminar series continues this Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 with "Mitigating Security Concerns about Cloud Archiving and eDiscovery."

Resident cloud archiving and eDiscovery expert, Andres Kohn, explores the risks and concerns you should consider when moving archiving and eDiscovery functions to the cloud.

IT departments are moving quickly to the cloud – enabling organizations to operate more quickly and more nimbly, and at a lower cost. However, this trend can raise a new set of concerns over how the organization should manage in-house eDiscovery processes and minimize risks.

As Andres has said on many occiasions, "Not all clouds are created equal..." and, in some cases, cloud computing can make the search, collection, and preservation of ESI more complex, time-consuming, and difficult, with much of the burden falling on the IT department.

During this web seminar, Andres will help answer key questions around these trends, including: How concerned should you be? And how can you minimize these risks while reaping the benefits of cloud computing?

To attend, please visit our registration page or simply complete the mini-form below! We hope to see you there!

Talking FISMA, Cloud Computing and Secure Messaging: Proofpoint and Proofpoint Customers in the News

A couple of recent news items I wanted to point out in case you haven't seen them.

First, our VP of Technology, Andres Kohn chatted with security blogger Alan Shimel for his ashimmy blog Security.EXE podcast. Andres and Alan talk about Proofpoint's work with Microsoft on what might be the biggest federal deployment of cloud technology to date (at the USDA), FISMA compliance and the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google for cloud dominance.

You can also listen to that segment right here:

Next, Proofpoint customer Kelsey-Seybold Clinic of Houston, TX is included in a recent Healthcare Informatics feature, "Secure Messaging via the Cloud and Mobile Devices." In that article, Martin Littmann, director IT systems for Kelsey-Seybold, briefly describes how that healthcare system uses Proofpoint's SaaS email security and data loss prevention solutions to help ensure the security of sensitive data.

Finally, we recently published a new customer case study on Adventist Health, a large California-based health system, that uses Proofpoint's cloud-based solutions for email security, HIPAA compliance and data loss prevention. Download a PDF copy of "Adventist Health gives Proofpoint's cloud-based email security solution a clean bill of health."

 

Think Your Data Can't be Safer in the Cloud? Andres Begs to Differ... But Not All Clouds are Created Equal, as Ponemon Confirms

Proofpoint's vice president of technology, Andrés Kohn, apparently used some mildly salty language at the opening of his well-attended InfoSecurity Europe presentation, "Can Data Be Safer in the Cloud?" last week.

If you're one of those cloud skeptics who holds the view that, to remain secure, data needs to stay within the corporate datacenter, Andrés begs to differ.

"Quite frankly, I think this view is a bunch of...," says Kohn.

All kidding aside, ServerWatch's Paul Rubens has an excellent overview of Andrés's talk, reported in 5 Reasons Why the Cloud Should be More Secure than Your Data Center.

Highly recommended reading, but in short, providers of secure, cloud-based services can potentially keep your data more secure than even your own datacenter through:

1. Greater Economies of Scale
2. More Secure Development Lifecycles
3. Continuous Auditing
4. Higher Levels of Automation and Repeatability
5. Stricter Access Controls

Of course, not every cloud-based vendor is going to follow security best practices or even make security a top priority.

A slightly scary press release and new report from the Ponemon Institute and CA Technologies drove that point home this week with some interesting data that shows that many providers of cloud-based services are focused more on delivering cost and speed-of-deployment advantages over security.

Among the findings:

• Fewer than 20% of cloud providers across the U.S. and Europe view security as a competitive advantage.
• Fewer than 30% of respondents consider security as an important responsibility.
• Fewer than 27% of respondents feel their cloud services substantially protect and secure customer information.
• The majority of cloud providers (69%) believe security is primarily the responsibility of the cloud user... In contrast to 35% of cloud users who believe security is their responsibility.

Yikes. Here's the link to the full report:

Ponemon Institute, Security of Cloud Computing Providers Study, April 2011
(PDF format)

Visit Proofpoint at InfoSecurity Europe 2011, Stand F50 this Week, Enter to Win an iPad 2

Our Director of Channel & International Marketing, Dave Crilley sent me this shot of Proofpoint's InfoSecurity Europe stand under construction. I trust that by now Dave and his team have things completely put together and are ready for the first day of the InfoSec show!

If you're in London for the InfoSecurity Europe 2011 event this week, do make a point of stopping by the Proofpoint stand, #F50, at Earls Court, London.

Our international team will be on hand to demonstrate our latest SaaS email security, email encryption, data loss prevention, email archiving & eDiscovery solutions... And while you're there, take our survey for a chance to win a new Apple iPad 2!

In addition to presentations and demos at our booth, Proofpoint will also be represented in the Technical Theater where Andres Kohn, our VP of Technology, will be presenting his talk, "Can Data Be More Secure in the Cloud?" on April 19th at Noon.

If you're in London and would like to attend the Infosecurity Europe 2011 for free, you can get a free pass courtesy of Proofpoint by visiting the following link:

Free Infosecurity Europe 2011 registration, courtesy of Proofpoint »

Hope to have more reports from the show floor for you as the week progresses!

Can Data be More Secure in the Cloud? Proofpoint's Andrés Kohn on How SaaS Can Deliver Higher Security

Proofpoint's vice president of technology, Andrés Kohn, is featured in this month's Messaging News, commenting on the topic, "Can Data be More Secure in the Cloud"?

Andrés's thesis is that there's no reason that data stored in the cloud can't be made more secure (and more reliable) than data stored on-premises. But organizations need to consider four key factors—the vendor's operational expertise, controlled environment, encryption architecture and redundant infrastructure—if they want to ensure that a particular cloud solution truly delivers superior security and reliability.

You can read the full article here: http://www.messagingnews.com/story/can-data-be-more-secure-cloud

Andrés is also presenting on the same topic this week at the Open Group Conference 2011 in San Diego. If you're attending that conference, do attend his talk Wednesday afternoon.

The full Open Group Conference program can be found here:

http://www.opengroup.org/sandiego2011/program.htm

Email Archiving Challenges: Two Perspectives - Podcast with Proofpoint's Andres Kohn

Our friend Keith Shaw over at Network World has a great new "Panorama" podcast up today where two email archiving experts—Proofpoint's own Andres Kohn and AppRiver's James Dean—talk about the email archiving challenges that both enterprises and SMBs face.

In "E-mail Archiving Challenges: Two Perspectives", Andres takes the enterprise perspective while James represents the SMB space.

You can have a listen by visiting Network World's site here:

http://www.networkworld.com/podcasts/panorama/2010/060710pan-archiving-twosides.html

Or you can download an mp3 version directly to your local machine here:

http://podcasts.networkworld.com/panorama/2010/060710pan-archiving-twosides.mp3

With eDiscovery, archiving and litigation readiness very much in the headlines these days (see my recent posts about BP and Piper Jaffray), you might want to learn more about the issues discussed in this podcast. In our upcoming live web seminar, "Surviving eDiscovery" we'll discuss initial steps for compliance and litigation readiness as well as provide practical advice for both legal and IT teams. To register, please visit:

http://www.proofpoint.com/id/survive-ediscovery/index.php?id=6

Hosted Email Archiving Feature at Messaging News

Messaging News has an extensive feature this month on "Preserving Email through Hosted Email Archiving" wherein Proofpoint's Andres Kohn is extensively quoted. This article provides a great overview of why more and more companies are looking to hosted email archiving solutions, rather than deploying an archiving solution on-premises.

Lots of good information in this article on the benefits of SaaS email archiving, security concerns, disaster recovery issues, eDiscovery and adoption trends.

Here's a brief excerpt:

For Proofpoint, the company saw the security issue as one of the biggest concerns people think of with SaaS. Kohn describes it this way: “I am now sending a copy of every email that I send and receive to somebody else. People got over that with inbound scanning, because they figured it was coming from the Internet anyway, but when you talk about all your internal email correspondence, that gets scarier. So people were really looking for a high-level of security, and that is where we have stepped into the fray.”

Proofpoint ARCHIVE is a hybrid model, where it is neither all on-premises, nor all in the cloud. “We decided to put what we thought were the right components in the right places,” explains Kohn. “Most of the infrastructure lives in our data centers. We also place a lightweight appliance that sits at the client site. What happens is that the appliance talks to the mail server; it grabs copies of all the messages, and encrypts it with a key that only the appliance has, and sends it to us encrypted. We have no way of ever being able to read any of the content, because the only key sits at the customer site. When a customer wants to do a search, they go to the appliance and the appliance encrypts the search terms and sends that to us. We get the results, but we do not even know what they are searching for.”

Find the whole article here:

http://www.messagingnews.com/story/preserving-email-through-hosted-archiving

BusinessWeek on Using Web-based Email for Business

The security and reliability of web-based (a.k.a., SaaS or cloud-based) messaging services has been in the news quite a bit recently with high-profile mail delays reported by users of Google's Postini email security service and the (apparently temporary) loss of data that affected users of the Sidekick mobile device.

Last week, Proofpoint VP of Technology Andres Kohn spoke with Arik Hesseldahl over at BusinessWeek and Arik's resulting article, "Web-based E-mail: Businesses Beware" is out today. The article discusses some of the pros and cons of web-based email services. Andres Kohn and other industry experts note that the free or low-cost consumer oriented email services often don't offer the service level guarantees that businesses should require. As Andres (quoted in the article) notes:   

Reputable hosted e-mail providers will lay out their backup policies, says Andres Kohn, vice-president of technology at Proofpoint, a firm that provides e-mail security and archiving solutions to large companies. "You have the right to ask a vendor what their disaster-recovery policy is and how they ensure they're not going to lose your data."

This isn't to say that the SaaS deployment model for email or email security is necessarily any riskier than on-premises approaches, just that enterprises require much higher levels of scalability, availability and security than is present in consumer-oriented services. And service level agreements (SLAs) must spell out the levels of service that will be delivered and what redress the customer will have in the event that SLAs are missed.

You can read the entire article here:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc20091018_124447.htm 

 

Email Archiving Saves Law Firm Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars per Discovery Event

Wednesday's Proofpoint web seminar, "Make the Case for Email Archiving" was a really great event. If you're looking for information on how to build a business case for deploying email archiving technology, you should really check out the full replay.

Proofpoint ARCHIVE customer Steven Heller, CTO of Graubard Miller, graciously took the time to be a guest presenter and shared a lot of great information about the business benefits that his firm has seen since deploying Proofpoint's SaaS email archiving solution.

I've extracted 17 minutes from that webinar, where Steve talks with our VP of technology, Andres Kohn, about how they use Proofpoint ARCHIVE, how they justified the deployment of archiving technology and some really great info about cost savings (including the fact that Proofpoint ARCHIVE saves the firm $200,000 to $400,000 in eDiscovery costs per discovery event).

Check it out in the embedded player, below:

BTW, you can find this and other videos on Proofpoint's Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/proofpoint.