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Protect your Microsoft investment with Proofpoint
Proofpoint stops modern email threats, more accurately with continuous detection and analysis, pre-delivery to post-delivery to click time, throughout the entire email delivery lifecycle. It’s time to enhance your Microsoft 365 security to better protect your people and business with Proofpoint.
With Proofpoint, your organisation can strengthen your Microsoft 365 security today
Microsoft is a great business productivity company, but…
Microsoft lacks robust email protection and exposes you to modern email threats. Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 email security capabilities struggle with commoditised and advanced threats, like phishing, malware, and ransomware. While their capabilities look good in PowerPoint, they lack detection efficacy and protection needed in today’s dynamic threat landscape. With Proofpoint, you can fortify your Microsoft 365 security now, and experience unparalleled threat detection, visibility, and operational simplicity, all with a compelling return on your investment.
Why customers choose Proofpoint over Microsoft
Superior detection efficacy
Microsoft on average misses more than 30% of all threats targeting organisations. Bad actors are easily bypassing native and add-on Microsoft 365 security controls, including MFA, and exploiting its outdated capabilities. Microsoft is ineffective against modern threats, forcing frequent and cumbersome updates just to maintain basic email protections. Microsoft delivers poor detection effectiveness, high false positives and is highly complex to operate and maintain.
Proofpoint provides continuous detection and analysis pre- and post-delivery through click time, giving you superior end-to-end threat protection. Our high-fidelity detection stack uses advanced AI, machine learning (ML), large language models (LLMs) and industry-leading threat intelligence to detect the most advanced email threats. With Proofpoint, you get 99.99% email detection efficacy, lower false positives, and an easy-to-use and easy-to-operate solution.
AI-driven Threat Protection
Microsoft struggles to detect and mitigate modern email threats, such as credential phishing, business email compromise (BEC) and socially engineered attacks. Microsoft’s static detection and analysis capabilities lead to poor threat detection and leaves your organisation open to compromise. While Microsoft promotes generative AI to improve your security, it doesn’t work well. It delivers inferior threat detection to your organisation at a higher cost.
Proofpoint has an AI-powered, multilayered detection stack that combines threat intelligence, static and dynamic threat analysis, behavioral AI, semantic analysis LLM, and predictive URL analysis and sandboxing to identify and stop modern threats in their tracks. With over two decades of AI/ML experience and more than 250 (and counting) AI patents, we deliver superior threat detection and end-to-end protection against modern email threats.
People and threat visibility
Microsoft can’t protect what it can’t see. With a lack of campaign and threat insights, no threat campaign correlation and no people risk visibility, Microsoft is blind to your biggest organisational risk: your people. Because they can’t identify people-based risk, Microsoft is in the dark to campaigns targeting your organisation, and most important, your people being targeted.
Proofpoint tracks threat trends, correlates campaign insights and automates threat forensics to allow you to better understand the type of threats impacting your organisation. Combined with our Very Attacked People™ (VAPs) visibility, we allow you to see which threats are targeting your users and how threat actors are attacking them. This allows you to quickly identify the users most at risk and potentially compromised, so you can take immediate remediation actions.
Proofpoint vs. Microsoft at a glance:
| People Protection Feature | Proofpoint Complete | Microsoft 365 E5 |
|---|---|---|
| Connection filter |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Inbound email authentication |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Basic email hygiene (AV/AS) |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Basic fraud protection (domain spoofing, display name and more) |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Advanced BEC protection |
Yes
|
No
|
| Contextual email warning tags |
Yes
|
No
|
| User-report message automation |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Email message hold |
Yes
|
No
|
| Basic attachment reputation |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Basic attachment sandboxing |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Basic URL rewrite |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Comprehensive URL sandboxing (pre- and post-delivery) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Manual message remediation |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Basic automatic message remediation (URLs and attachments) |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Browser isolation (Very Attacked People) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Semantic analysis LLM detection (pre-delivery) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Advanced QR code detection and analysis (scan all inbound URLs pre-delivery) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Misdirected email and attachments |
Yes
|
No
|
| Comprehensive campaign and threat insights |
Yes
|
No
|
| Agentless threat detection |
Yes
|
No
|
| Deception-based threat detection |
Yes
|
No
|
| Automated reset of malicious user account configuration changes in M365 |
Yes
|
No
|
| Sophisticated account takeover detection |
Yes
|
No
|
| Compromised vendor account identification and alerting |
Yes
|
No
|
| Supplier compromised account risk scoring |
Yes
|
No
|
| Adaptive controls (isolation) for compromised supplier accounts and Very Attacked People |
Yes
|
No
|
| Secure transactional email from internal applications and SaaS providers |
Yes
|
No
|
| DMARC compliance of transactional email via DKIM-signing |
Yes
|
No
|
| Application email regulatory compliance via encryption and data loss prevention |
Yes
|
No
|
| Delivered threat alerting |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Forensics/IOCs (URLs and attachments) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Campaign correlation |
Yes
|
No
|
| Threat actor analytics, reports and trending |
Yes
|
No
|
| SaaS application visibility |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| People risk explorer |
Yes
|
No
|
| Adaptive controls to combat targeting trends |
Yes
|
No
|
| Executive threat summarisation |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Condemnation threat summarisation |
Yes
|
No
|
| Comprehensive identity vulnerability discovery and remediation, including cloud services and endpoints |
Yes
|
No
|
| Attack path visibility to prioritise risk remediation |
Yes
|
No
|
| Full attack sequence timeline view |
Yes
|
No
|
| Suspected compromised supplier account insights |
Yes
|
No
|
| Spoofed supplier domain visibility |
Yes
|
No
|
| Global supplier high-risk rankings |
Yes
|
No
|
| Comprehensive suspicious domain visibility |
Yes
|
No
|
| Complete email domain visibility (hijacked domains, domain abuse rate, DMARC, SPF, DKIM pass rates and more) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Supplier DMARC record validation visibility (Nexus Supplier Risk Explorer) |
Yes
|
No
|
| Supplier DMRAC message volume and message visibility from lookalike supplier domains (Nexus Supplier Risk Explorer) |
Yes
|
No
|
We’re recognised as an industry leader by leading analyst firms and customers alike
At Proofpoint, our mission is to protect your people and your business. Microsoft’s mission is to sell you more Microsoft. Microsoft email security is outdated, ineffective and they know it, so they sell you more solutions. Unlike Microsoft, Proofpoint provides a complete email security solution that provides you with end-to-end protection against known and unknown threats. It’s no wonder why 83% of the Fortune 100 trust Proofpoint to enhance Microsoft native security.
"However, we dinged Microsoft on inconsistencies in reporting across dashboards and on the number of malicious emails that continue to reach inboxes despite the arsenal of well-regarded detection and response capabilities the vendor brings to bear."
- Forrester Wave
Proofpoint ranked #1 in G2's Summer 2023 Email Security Report
A proven leader
Proofpoint Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Email Security, Q2 2023
Read More
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KuppingerCole Analysts Report: Leadership Compass Email Security
Better together with Proofpoint
Microsoft is complex to run—and complex to maintain
Microsoft email security is nice and shiny, but it’s challenging to operate and maintain. The allure of Microsoft fades quickly when you consider its risks. It has hidden costs and complexities that burdened organisations in terms of maintenance, operational efficiencies, customer support and total cost of ownership (TCO).
Unlike Microsoft, Proofpoint provides you with an easy-to-use and an easy-to-operate solution while delivering superior operational efficiencies, and lower risks and total cost of ownership.
Better together with Proofpoint
Microsoft talks a big game about safeguarding people, data and infrastructure. What they really mean is: We only protect Microsoft applications, systems and infrastructure, such as Microsoft 365,Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and others. Microsoft doesn’t secure and integrate with leading third-party cybersecurity vendors. Why would they? They want you to buy more Microsoft solutions.
Unlike Microsoft, Proofpoint integrates and supports a rich ecosystem of leading cybersecurity vendors, such as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, Okta, SailPoint, and even Microsoft Defender and Sentinel. Our API-based integrations combine endpoint, network and identity intelligence with Proofpoint threat intelligence, behavioral AI and machine learning. This provides you with enhanced security coverage, advanced threat detection and remediation, and lower operational costs.
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