Proofpoint is one of the largest and most respected names in enterprise email security — used by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Proofpoint Essentials makes that threat intelligence accessible to small and mid-size businesses, packaged specifically for organizations without enterprise security budgets or dedicated security operations teams. Infinity Data Center offers Proofpoint Essentials with full setup, configuration, and ongoing engineering support.
What Is Proofpoint Essentials?
Proofpoint Essentials is a cloud-delivered email security platform that processes inbound and outbound email through Proofpoint's global threat intelligence network. When a suspicious message arrives, Proofpoint checks it against threat data gathered from billions of messages across thousands of enterprise customer environments — giving SMBs access to the same threat feeds protecting the world's largest organizations.
The platform is managed through Proofpoint's web console, with Infinity Data Center's engineering team handling initial setup, custom policy configuration, and ongoing tuning. Proofpoint Essentials does not require hardware and does not modify your mail server — it operates as an MX gateway, processing mail before it reaches StrataMail, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or any other mail system.
Proofpoint Essentials comes in six plans. Business covers baseline filtering in both directions with a 30-day emergency inbox. Advanced adds attachment sandboxing and outbound encryption. Professional adds archiving. The plus variants add message retraction, pre-delivery link scanning, warning tags, and business email compromise defense — and those controls do not carry into the non-plus plans above them, which is the detail most buyers miss.
Why Enterprise Intelligence Matters for SMBs
Email threat actors do not limit their campaigns to enterprise targets. Phishing kits, ransomware-as-a-service, and BEC toolkits are sold on criminal marketplaces for low prices — meaning the same threat techniques targeting Fortune 500 companies show up in the inboxes of small businesses. The difference is that large enterprises have access to threat intelligence that lets their security systems recognize and block these attacks before they reach users. Proofpoint Essentials gives SMBs access to that same intelligence without the enterprise price tag or the need to employ a security team to operate it.
Threats Proofpoint Blocks
- Advanced phishing — including multi-stage attacks, evasion techniques, and targeted spear-phishing campaigns
- Business email compromise (BEC) — supplier impersonation, executive spoofing, and lookalike domain attacks
- Ransomware and malware — delivered via attachment or malicious link, including novel variants not yet in public databases
- Data loss — outbound policies that keep sensitive content from leaving your domain
- Bulk spam and graymail — high-accuracy filtering with low false positive rates and per-user quarantine management
The 30-Day Emergency Inbox
Every Proofpoint Essentials plan includes a 30-day emergency inbox and Instant Replay. If your primary mail system is unavailable, users sign in to the Proofpoint web portal to read and respond to recent mail until the outage clears. Outlook and phone mail apps do not keep working during that time — access is through the browser portal. For organizations that need Outlook and phones to keep working, or that want inbound mail captured and redelivered on their own infrastructure, Infinity Data Center's StrataMail Email Continuity pairs with Proofpoint as the failover destination.
Infinity Data Center Setup & Support
Switching to Proofpoint Essentials is an MX record change. Our engineering team makes it with you and handles the rest of the setup: policy definition, initial tuning, and integration with your existing mail environment. Ongoing support for policy changes, quarantine review, and incident investigation is available through our standard engineering support channels, and accounts already running on Proofpoint Essentials elsewhere can be moved to us. See Proofpoint Essentials at Infinity Data Center for published per-user pricing on all six plans, contact us, or call 866.790.4678 to discuss your environment.