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.
I recommend Enterprise Vault, especially over native Exchange archiving when: 1. You have, or may need litigation holds and searches 2. There is a need to archive and set defined retention periods for Journaling 3. You have lots of duplicate large emails that you want to get deduplication of 4. You need/ want to be able to search attachment in addition to emails 5. You want or need Litigation searches or archive retention to be handled by a team separate from your Email team
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.
EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web.
EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage.
EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface.
We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports.
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.
Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
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.
I haven't research any other software against Enterprise Vault. Office 365 automatically has archiving capabilities that we use in the cloud. In comparison to Office 365, I'd say Office 365 comes out on top. For one thing, we essentially don't have to manage it. It also seems to preform better. However, Enterprise Vault does very well if you have an on-premise email solution.
