Every year when our customers share their stories on stage or off at our annual user security awareness conference the Proofpoint teams learn new ways to approach innovation. We received an incredible amount of questions, comments, feedback, new perspectives, and connections from our virtual security awareness training event to help shape our investment into their success.
I wanted to highlight some of the most compelling items from Wisdom 2020.
How We're Accelerating Innovation with a People-Centric Approach
Alan LeFort, our SVP and GM of Proofpoint Security Awareness Training, followed our CEO Gary Steele’s introduction with how we’re accelerating innovation and taking a unique approach to driving customer outcomes.
There have been some amazing innovations and firsts in the security space, including The Defence Works acquisition, partnership with TeachPrivacy, Attack Spotlight education, Customization Center, and Closed-Loop Email Analysis and Response (CLEAR) solution. But more importantly than that, we’re focused on leveraging our people-centric security platform to get better visibility for administrators looking to run an effective security awareness program.
Regardless of the technology they’re using, we want to help administrators provide their identified risky people with the right education so they can have the right response to today’s dangerous attacks.
After that, we dove into even more detail about our roadmap and upcoming innovations, which you learn more about here.
Later in the day hundreds of customers joined us for an optional hands-on workshop on identifying and communicating risk. The two-hour session showed customers how different reports can drive better decisions in making a program successful. We went hands-on to show customers how they can benchmark themselves with other organizations, automate their reporting, and even how to integrate Very Attacked People, or VAPs, into a security awareness program.
On the second day, we had another roadmap session followed by live customer feedback sessions on specific product areas. We got to hear ideas and input from hundreds of customers on how we can best drive innovation to meet their goals.
Why People-Centric Security Matters
Our keynote featured Alan Levine, former Fortune 500 CISO on his journey from security awareness doubter to believer. And it’s the perfect demonstration of the marked shift in the threat landscape from attackers targeting exploits to people. He explains how a widely-publicized nation-state attack on his organization completely shifted his views on how security controls can be implemented to be effective. And it was a shift towards people.
Our customers also got to tell their success stories and interact live with the audience. Their wisdom and conversations shined through as the highlight of our virtual event.
Wisdom from Proofpoint Security Awareness Customers
On the first day of the conference, we did a panel on the changes to security awareness with the new working from a home environment. We learned about smart strategies, like:
- Leveraging existing corporate communication channels for security awareness
- Sending an educational “post simulated phish” email to all explaining the exercise and providing tips on what to do
- Why “reporting rate” rather than “click rate” helps put security awareness efforts in a better light
After we had dozens of questions to answer from customers in addition to distinct strategies shared for how their organizations are making security awareness a silver lining of our current day situation.
On the second day of the conference, we heard from Mike Bacon, Sr. Director of Technology Retail Systems at Ethan Allen about how to effectively measure and report real value for security awareness. With Ethan Allen’s large footprint and vertical integration, their program had to address a large breadth of threats and diverse audiences. They talked about how they integrated their security awareness program with email security to align their strategies, save users and admins time, and drive better behavior change. You can learn some of their story from the video above.
If you’re a Proofpoint Security Awareness Training customer and missed the event, we’ll have the recordings up shortly on the Wisdom Community accessible from the home page.
Missed Wisdom? Join Us for Protect 2020
If you’re interested in hearing more wisdom from Proofpoint customers you can join us for Protect Global 2020 on September 9-10. At this virtual event, you can learn about email security, cloud security, information protection, modern compliance, security awareness, or CISO/Leadership strategy. You’ll hear from customers like Rebecca Harness, CISO of Saint Louis University, about how they’re graduating good cyber citizens while reducing IT overhead with Proofpoint’s solutions. Register here.