But Gartner cautioned that Proofpoint's emphasis on its secure e-mail gateway offering may limit its appeal compared to its larger competitors that have a wider array of security technology.
"Proofpoint continues to have a smaller market and mind share, compared with early market competitors. Proofpoint needs to improve its delivery through the channel, rather than its dedicated sales force," the report noted.
The Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy security-as-a-service (SaaS) offering helps companies make sure they protect the privacy of customers and of company intellectual property. Because it's a SaaS offering, Proofpoint constantly updates its service as regulations change, says Kohn. He cites the example of the announcement from the White House Feb. 23 of a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which may require businesses to adopt new practices to protect privacy.
The Proofpoint Enterprise Governance, meanwhile, helps organizations track, classify and apply policy to all the content it creates, no matter where it lives -- on-premise, at a branch office or in the cloud.
"When it saves a document for the first time, it creates a fingerprint and a classification to that document and then when it is edited or sent in an e-mail, we track that document throughout its lifecycle," Kohn says. "Then organizations are easily able to put in place retention policies, destruction policies and understand what's going on without having to impact the user's work style at all."
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