Proofpoint Enhances Its SaaS Email Archiving Solution

Proofpoint, Inc., provider of unified email security, email archiving and data loss prevention solutions, introduced a new version of Proofpoint ARCHIVE, Proofpoint’s SaaS email archiving solution.

Part of the Proofpoint on Demand suite of cloud-based email security and compliance solutions, Proofpoint ARCHIVE makes it easy for organizations to securely archive email and solve the storage management, legal discovery and regulatory compliance challenges associated with email retention. The new version introduces features for faster and easier eDiscovery and improved management of legal holds including new policy engine and workflow enhancements, improved support for historical email, enhanced end user search capabilities and support for Instant Message (IM) archiving.

"With the new version of its email archiving solution, Proofpoint has once again established class leading capabilities," said Tyler Verri, security analyst for Sub-Zero Wolf, Inc. "Proofpoint ARCHIVE has become an even more effective and flexible tool for us with the significant enhancements to legal hold, workflow, search capabilities and the streamlined end-user interface. What was already an excellent solution is now more powerful and the new capabilities will allow users across our organization to find relevant emails more quickly and easily, whether they are engaged in legal discovery or simply personal email management."

The company also announced that the DoubleBlind Encryption technology used in Proofpoint ARCHIVE has been granted US patent #7,512,814 (Secure and Searchable Storage System and Method) by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This breakthrough encryption technology provides Proofpoint ARCHIVE users with guaranteed data security coupled with high-speed searchability. Using DoubleBlind Encryption technology, all data stored in the Proofpoint ARCHIVE hosted datacenters is encrypted by a key held only by the customer. At the same time, all archived email remains fully searchable with results returned in seconds.

Proofpoint ARCHIVE combines storage and search in the cloud with a lightweight, on-premises appliance to deliver the performance, scalability and cost savings of SaaS while providing the highest levels of security for each organization’s archived data. The Proofpoint ARCHIVE solution securely stores encrypted email data in the cloud while the on-site Proofpoint ARCHIVE appliance ensures security between the local email server and Proofpoint’s storage cloud.

This separation of email data in the cloud and encryption keys on the customer’s premises means that protected information is only accessible when the two components are used together. DoubleBlind Encryption is unique in that it maintains data in encrypted form while still providing full search and discovery capabilities. When an authorized user conducts search and discovery through the appliance’s Web-based user interface, returned email messages are decrypted via the appliance. Without the appliance, DoubleBlind encrypted messages remain indecipherable.

Proofpoint’s grid storage and search architecture ensures high-speed search results for Proofpoint ARCHIVE users. Search results are returned in just seconds, regardless of the size of a customer’s archive, with near-instantaneous search results guaranteed by Proofpoint ARCHIVE’s service level agreements.

"Traditional enterprise email archiving solutions have forced enterprises to compromise on either security or cost of ownership. On-premises archiving solutions have proven expensive to install and maintain, hard to scale and provide unending IT headaches," said Andres Kohn, vice president & general manager for Proofpoint’s email archiving business. "Proofpoint’s next-generation SaaS approach coupled with patented encryption technology provides the security and functionality of on-premises solutions combined with the low predictable costs, reliable service and infinite scalability afforded by SaaS."

"Osterman Research’s recent analysis of the cost of email archiving solutions showed that SaaS email archiving can offer dramatic cost savings versus an on-premises approach," said Michael Osterman, CEO of Osterman Research. "These savings can be realized even for very large organizations and regardless of required retention periods, compliance requirements or redundancy requirements."

New Features and Enhancements of Proofpoint ARCHIVE

• Policy engine enhancements – support for indefinite email retention periods and more granular control of archiving policies
• Active Legal Hold System – preserves the integrity of historical email and captures new email that is relevant to ongoing legal holds
• Supervision review workflow enhancements – The powerful supervision capabilities of Proofpoint ARCHIVE have been enhanced with the ability to comment, forward or close messages in a review queue and the ability to more easily locate archived emails related to a message under review
• Email stubbing enhancements – stubbing of historical email and enhanced retention policies for stubbed email attachments (whereby email attachments stored in Exchange are replaced with a much smaller ‘stub’ file that points to an archived copy of the original attachment, greatly reducing the storage requirements on the local Exchange server – the original attachment can be retrieved from the archive at any time for viewing or forwarding purposes)
• Enhanced end-user search – improved search interface simplifies complex searches while delivering results in seconds, backed by Proofpoint’s industry-leading search performance SLAs
• Additional message archiving – ability to archive Instant Messaging (IM) conversations from Microsoft Office Communications Server

Pricing and Availability
The new version of Proofpoint ARCHIVE will be available in July 2009. Pricing for the service starts at $32 per user per year.

To see a video in which Andres Kohn explains the benefits and features of the latest Proofpoint ARCHIVE update and how it simplifies eDiscovery, delivers high-speed email search and ensures complete security of archived data.