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SOHO Messaging Filter Upgrades

Postini End Of Life

During the month of December 2014, Google’s Postini email security service will be transitioned to Proofpoint Essentials. To avoid all service interruptions, SOHO Solutions will be handling the migration of all it’s managed services clients to Proofpoint email security services.

Here are a few new features we have to look forward to with Proofpoint:

1. Increase usability and efficiency.
Proofpoint’s quarantine user portal has a wide range of options and is easy to navigate increasing usability, and decreasing downtime.

2. More granular detection of spam, bulk mail, and email-borne threats (phish).
Proofpoint includes specific classifiers that categorize email and enable granular dispositions on those categories. One of those classifiers is for “bulk mail” (e.g. newsletters, opt-in emails, etc.). Unlike Google’s approach to spam detection, Proofpoint does not treat bulk mail as spam, as there might be legitimate cases where such mail needs to be delivered (e.g. some end users might opt-in to a medical newsletter on diabetes, and classifying such an email as spam is clearly a false positive).

3. Email Continuity with the Proofpoint Essentials Emergency Inbox & Instant Replay
Proofpoint keeps your company email running no matter what catastrophe may strike. Emergency Inbox keeps a cloud copy of all your emails even if your exchange service is down, inaccessible, or on fire. Instant Replay quickly restores any emails that we damaged, missing, or deleted, all without missing a beat.

With these changes we want all our clients to be ahead of the curve. For a brief tutorial of the new services please watch the Proofpoint Essential videos below.

Emergency Inbox & Instant Replay

 

How Do I View My Quarantine?

 

How Do I Create a Filter?

 

Here is the Proofpoint Essentials full feature list.

Phishing detection

Phishing Detection Technologies
Granular and configurable policies for phishing messages
Separate quarantines for phishing messages
Real-time notification and alerting of phishing messages
Automated delivery of reports for phishing messages
Google puts phishing messages with Bulk Mail and spam into the Junk Folder which can be accessed by end users through the Google Message Center. This forces end users to make split second security decisions is this bulk mail that I signed up for or is this a targeted attack? Additionally, Proofpoint uses advanced machine learning technology to detect phishing messages and perform a unique action on them. Most customers choose to separate phishing messages into an administrative quarantine.

Spam detection and effectiveness

Spam Detection Technologies
Reputation-based spam detection
Spam policies for Bulk Mail, sexually explicit
Spam policies for get rich quick, special offers, racially insensitive
Spam effectiveness and false positive SLA
Email connection throttling and termination
Machine learning technology for accurate content analysis
Outbound spam detection
Proofpoint uses advanced machine learning technology to granularly and more accurately detect spam (unsolicited bulk mail) and solicited bulk mail. This allows administrators to configure policies so that end users have access only to specific types of spam: eg, a quarantine that contains only bulk mail, a quarantine that contains only adult spam, and a quarantine that only contains spam.

Virus detection and effectiveness

Virus Detection Technologies
100% Anti-virus SLA
Zero-Hour Anti-virus detection for zero-day protection
Anti-virus engineF-secure
Although virus detection capabilities look the same, most customers that perform a threat assessment see reports that Proofpoint can detect 29 viruses over a seven day period.

Policies for email attachments and message limits

Email Attachment Policies
Size of attachments
Binary file detection
Password protected files
Number of attachments
Daily message limits

Content filtering of email attachments

Content Filtering Of Email Attachment Types
Microsoft Office 2003 files
Microsoft Office 2007 files
Microsoft Office 2010 files
Adobe PDF files
Google has not updated the filtering technology used by Postini since before 2007. This puts your organization at risk for data loss, since organizations and users routinely send PDFs and Microsoft Office 2007 or 2007 files outside of the organization.

Data Loss Prevention

Data Loss Prevention Technologies
Policy-based encryption
Pre-configured compliance policies for SSNs and all CCs
Pre-configured compliance policies for HIPAA, GLBA, PCI
Smart Identifiers – algorithmic checks of structured data
Managed Dictionaries – pre-defined and updated libraries
Advanced proximity and correlation analysis
Content rules based on regular expressions
Document fingerprinting for protecting digital assets
Optimized message decryption for mobile devices
End-user triggered encryption for sensitive data
Per-message encryption keys
DLP incident dashboard for administrative remediation
How much time does your organization spend manually creating data loss prevention policies? Or, does your organization require end users to manually trigger encryption? A recent survey by the Ponemon institute showed that employees mistakenly send unencrypted confidential information to other recipients outside the workplace on a regular basis (63% of their respondents). It is more than likely time for you to consider a re-evaluation in your compliance policies.

Message Encryption

Message Encryption Technologies
Transparent encryption (TLS)
Policy-based encryption
Optimized message decryption for mobile devices
End-user triggered encryption for sensitive data
Per-message encryption keys
End-user revocation controls for encrypted messages
Does your organization require end users to manually trigger encryption? A recent survey by the Ponemon institute showed that employees mistakenly send unencrypted confidential information to other recipients outside the workplace.

Reporting and Log Search

Reporting and Log Search Technologies
Same day reporting
Support for IPv6
Automated publishing, scheduling, and email delivery of reports
DLP Dashboard – consolidated view of compliance activity
Log search delay5 Minutes
Log search by sender, recipient, or message ID
Log search by subject
Log search by attachment name
How much real-time visibility does your organization have into the emails entering and leaving your organization? Are you able to investigate email usage or email-related threats as they are happening?

End User Functionality

Features Available To End Users
Quarantine release
Configurable per user spam policies
Per user “Approved Senders” and “Blocked Senders” lists
Per user regional and language settings
Self-remediation of outbound spam
Self-remediation of DLP incidents
Proofpoint and Google have similar functionality for end users within their spam quarantines and spam policy configuration. Proofpoint can further secure and streamline business communications by enabling end users to self-remediate DLP violations and messages detected as spam. Is your organization required to inform users of email related policies? Proofpoint allows end users to be notified of that an email contains sensitive content, and then allows end users to self-remediate those violations to streamline business communications. End users can acknowledge their email has a legitimate business purpose without the need of a compliance officer releasing the email.

Platform

Features
Domain specific spam policies
Domain specific email routing
LDAP synchronization
Dedicated instances for segregation of data and downtime
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