Proofpoint Ramping Up Big MSP Growth Push In North America: Exec

The efforts follow Proofpoint’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Microsoft 365 security specialist Hornetsecurity and are delivering crucial capabilities for securing SMB customers, one MSP partner tells CRN.

Proofpoint’s launch of a business unit and Microsoft 365 security platform focused on meeting the needs of MSPs and their SMB customers marks a major advancement for the managed service provider market, according to an MSP executive.

The debut of the dedicated Proofpoint MSP Platform business unit and North American introduction of the Proofpoint 365 Total Protection platform are clear indications that the email and data security powerhouse vendor is making the right moves to ramp up its efforts with MSPs, said Brian Betzen, founder and chief technologist at veraTECH Solutions, an Austin-based MSP.

Without a doubt, the recent launches—which follow Proofpoint’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Microsoft 365 security specialist Hornetsecurity, completed in December—are delivering crucial capabilities for securing SMB customers, Betzen said.

While Proofpoint has long excelled at the enterprise side of security, Hornetsecurity had “nailed down MSP-centric, SMB email security—and that was something that Proofpoint was lacking,” he said. “It was a very good idea for them to bring in Hornetsecurity for them to increase their base—and be able to service the MSP market that specifically works with the SMB vertical.”

Proofpoint’s dedicated organization for the MSP business includes pre-sales, support teams, partner account managers and account executives working with distribution partners, according to Daniel Blank, senior vice president for global MSP sales at Proofpoint.

Notably, the company has signed contracts with marketplaces such as Pax8 to carry the Proofpoint 365 product family in North America, including Proofpoint 365 Total Protection offerings, with plans to work with additional distributors in the future, Blank said. Hornetsecurity’s MSP-focused offering had largely focused on the European market previously.

The moves ultimately aim to bolster security for the countless smaller businesses served by MSPs, many of which do not have different security needs than large enterprises—they just lack the expertise and resources to manage enterprise-level tools, he said.

“If we look into the SMB or in the MSP market, it is not that an SMB, a small customer, has different demands,” Blank said. “The problem is they do not have the same capacities and, probably, the same knowledge when it comes to certain topics. So that's where the MSP is kicking in. They need an external specialist who helps them to navigate through all the different challenges.”

The Proofpoint 365 Total Protection offering is geared toward meeting those needs with its AI-powered security platform built specifically for MSPs, including multi-tenancy and automation around provisioning and invoicing as well as simplified management, he said.

“What Hornetsecurity brought here is basically the same [enterprise-level] security, but simplified for MSP,” Blank said. “It’s not that we have a lower grade of cybersecurity.”

Key Differentiators

For veraTECH Solutions, which had been a Hornetsecurity partner prior to the acquisition by Proofpoint, several years of working with the Hornetsecurity email security capabilities has shown how powerful the platform is for protecting SMBs, Betzen said.

Key differentiators include the platform’s combination of both gateway-level email protection and direct integration into Microsoft 365 mailboxes, he said.

Crucially, having that direct connection into Microsoft 365 provides MSPs such as veraTECH with the ability to remove malicious emails even after delivery, according to Betzen.

“If something does slip through, and gets put in somebody's inbox, Proofpoint has the ability for us to go into that inbox and pull that malicious email out after it's been delivered,” he said.

Having the Hornetsecurity offering become a part of Proofpoint offers a big advantage on inbox protection in other ways, as well, Betzen said.

With Proofpoint’s enterprise platform seeing massive amounts of email flowing through on a continual basis, those data insights can now be applied to securing SMB emails, too, he noted.

“They can take all the telemetry from those billions of emails and utilize it to increase the effectiveness of Hornetsecurity’s product,” Betzen said. “Both sides benefit from the other, in terms of the data that they have and how it can be used to make both products better.”