Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Proofpoint Intelligent Compliance

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

Proofpoint Intelligent Compliance is well suited for organizations with a large amount of employees, in my opinion, as they have a lot of options for grouping users in various ways to send specific learning content to them. For a smaller organization, the employees might utilize all of the built-in training videos, phishing simulations, and content more rapidly, which would not justify the pricey cost of the tool.

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Email archiving. Being able to access, on the fly, your entire email archive. Being able to filter by date, sender, attachment, etc. It can get really granular and is able to pull up records fast.
• Targeted Attack Protection for all incoming emails. Having the ability to automatically scan, quarantine, or re-write URLs within emails. Comparing incoming emails to potential phishing attempts already seen by other institutions.
• Email encryption & automatic encryption are based on certain rules set up on the firewall. e.g. automatically encrypt outgoing email if it has an attachment or contains a string of numbers that may be personal information.

Incentivized

• Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
• Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
• Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.

Incentivized

• The end-user interface is lacking in appeal/aesthetics and is not that intuitive. I have seen archive solutions that don't work very well have a better interface than this. I think the interface can be prettied up quite a bit.
• The admin interface is lacking in features and is not intuitive. It has more capabilities than the previous archives I've used, but utilizing these features is a little complicated without demos or being walked through it.
• We have had a lot of accounts not map properly. Apparently, there is a limit as to how many errors can be outstanding before you run into issues because all the emails tied to those issues are "queued" waiting for a home (and there is a storage limit for that). I have to set a reminder to check that periodically and resolve the issues manually.

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

We did a bake off and for our particular needs Proofpoint was the right product. We used a matrix with requirements and their product checked all the boxes. Making it a easy decision.

Incentivized

• Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
• Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

Incentivized

• Strengthened our staff's Cybersecurity Skills.
• Provided a variety of additional training content that is used throughout the year
• Allowed us to track and monitor which of our users need additional training in regard to Cybersecurity

Incentivized