Proofpoint Adds Microsoft 365 Risk Dashboard, Teams Training and AI Assistant for MSPs

The first of the four, Tenant Risk Exposure, maps permission and sharing risks across Microsoft 365 tenants. It is aimed at administrators who already use Proofpoint's 365 Permission Manager to track access rights. The dashboard shows them, tenant by tenant, where anonymous access and inactive guest accounts have appeared, and a shortcut beside each finding lets them close the exposure by hand. Remediation can also be run automatically.

The second change covers email verdicts. Security teams reviewing a message in Email Live Tracking will now see an explanation of how the unit's AI reached its verdict on that message. Proofpoint says the added context should speed up work on the rare false positive.

Third, the company's AI-powered Security Awareness Service now operates inside Microsoft Teams. Employees who finish an e-learning session are quizzed by AI.MY, the business unit's AI Cyber Assistant, acting as a coach. The three follow-up questions are pitched at each person's awareness level, and feedback comes back immediately. Answers are stored in a knowledge profile that organizations can use to measure learning progress and identify who needs more training.

The fourth feature is an AI assistant for partners and administrators, built into the control panel of Proofpoint 365 Total Protection, a Microsoft 365 security suite originally developed by German security company Hornetsecurity GmbH. It answers conversational questions about onboarding, configuration and day-to-day security operations. Managed service providers can also use it to match products to a given customer and to find places to extend that customer's protection. Proofpoint expects the assistant to cut the effort providers spend on customer consultations.

Daniel Hofmann, general manager and executive vice president of Proofpoint MSP Platform, said the data and channels an AI tool can reach matter as much as the choice of tool itself. Overly broad permissions and unclear sharing settings existed before AI arrived, he said, and using the technology "can amplify their impact."

Proofpoint closed its $1.8 billion purchase of Hornetsecurity in December and built the MSP unit on top of that business in May. More than 12,000 managed service providers and channel partners now sell the unit's products to upward of 125,000 customers, according to SiliconANGLE. The four new features are scheduled to reach those partners in the fourth quarter.

Editor's Summary

Proofpoint is adding a tenant risk dashboard, explained AI email verdicts, Microsoft Teams security training and an AI assistant to the Microsoft 365 products sold through its MSP Platform. The features are scheduled to reach more than 12,000 managed service providers and channel partners in the fourth quarter, extending the business Proofpoint built on its $1.8 billion Hornetsecurity acquisition.