Agent-powered solution bridges the gap between data discovery, classification and real-time enforcement—eliminating manual bottlenecks and unlocking scalable data security
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – April 22, 2025 – Proofpoint, Inc., a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, today announced the launch of the industry’s first unified data security solution designed to simplify one of the most complex and fragmented challenges organizations face: locating their data, classifying it correctly, controlling who can access it, and monitoring how people interact with it across all channels, from endpoints and email to the web and the cloud.
Organizations today face escalating data security risks driven by uncontrolled data sprawl across cloud apps, collaboration tools, endpoints, and AI services—often beyond the visibility of security teams. The vendor landscape has only intensified this challenge, offering fragmented, single-channel data loss prevention and other point solutions that prevent security teams from gaining a complete view of their data exposure. The rapid adoption of generative AI compounds the problem, as employees increasingly interact with sensitive data in unpredictable ways. Proofpoint’s 2024 Data Loss Landscape Report reveals that 85% of organizations experienced a data loss incident last year, and over a quarter of enterprises don’t know where their sensitive data resides.
Proofpoint’s new unified data security approach addresses these challenges head-on by combining data loss prevention (DLP), data security posture management (DSPM), and insider threat management into a single, unified architecture. Built on Proofpoint Nexus — which combines AI models, behavioral analytics, and human risk intelligence across every control point — and new AI agents, this solution enables organizations to locate their sensitive data, understand its nature, govern access, prevent most data loss, and monitor any risky actions that cannot be prevented.
“Securing data is fundamentally a human problem, amplified by growing data sprawl and increasing complexity,” said Mayank Choudhary, executive vice president and general manager, Data Security Group at Proofpoint. “With today’s announcement, we are redefining how organizations approach data security. Our unified platform converges DLP, DSPM, and insider threat management to eliminate the patchwork of point solutions that fail to meet the demands of today’s AI-first, data-centric world. It is adaptive, intelligent, and prepared for an agentic AI future.”
Data Security Transformed: Intelligent, Agent-Driven, and Adaptive
Like many other cybersecurity challenges, data security is conceptually simple but has proven very difficult to implement at scale. If security teams had unlimited resources and time, they could easily classify every document and data store, ensure that only the right people and accounts had access to it, and monitor alerts on anything that looked unusual. In the real world, however, few teams have the resources they would like to apply to protecting their data.
To finally realize the promise of unified data security, two types of transformation need to occur. First, foundational capabilities need to extend across all the key control points where data is accessed and worked with. To that end, Proofpoint’s data security solution now includes two key new platform capabilities:
- Unified policy engine: Proofpoint is the first to deliver a unified policy engine across data loss prevention, data security posture management, and insider threat management. This groundbreaking approach ensures consistent enforcement of data security policies to prevent data exfiltration and reduce data exposure risks across email, endpoints, SaaS, and cloud or on-premises data stores.
- Nexus data lineage: Proofpoint enriches behavioral-based and content-centric controls with cross-channel data lineage, powered by a highly scalable and flexible Nexus data activity graph. This groundbreaking capability not only provides end-to-end visibility into data flows for incident response—tracking content from its origin through all manipulations, down to egress channels—but also enables security teams to apply controls based on a file’s location and contextual intelligence.
The second transformation is from tedious, manual activities to AI agents. There will never be enough well-trained humans to classify a typical organizations’ data, much less decide who and what should have access to it. AI agents are a key force multiplier, able to scale infinitely to classify data and learn how organizations want to protect it. Proofpoint’s unified approach to data security not only strengthens protection against today’s threats, but also establishes the architecture needed to safely scale data security in an agentic-AI ready future.
Key new agent-driven capabilities for Proofpoint’s unified data security solution include:
- Real-time AI-powered data classification: Proofpoint transforms sensitive data classification with Nexus AI Data Classifiers. Pre-trained LLM classifiers, available today, accurately identifiy sensitive data, such as company IP, with unmatched precision, discovering information that previously remained hidden and unprotected due to the limitations of legacy approaches. Building on this foundation, Proofpoint will introduce agentic AI auto-learning capabilities that dynamically evolve classification schemes based on an organization’s unique sensitive data.
- Automated adaptive DSPM controls for greater efficiency: Proofpoint delivers one-click remediation capabilities to remove excessive privileges and prevent data exposures for cloud and on-premises data stores, reducing manual effort for data security teams. These capabilities leverage Proofpoint’s Nexus AI-powered data classification to accurately identify sensitive data and risks.
These capabilities join Proofpoint’s intent-aware data loss and insider controls to enable organizations to prevent the vast majority of data loss, while adaptively deploy additional controls to users who place data at risk.
Industry-leading enterprises including Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, work with Proofpoint to confidently reduce data risk across its global ecosystem and enhance end user compliance at scale. Leveraging Proofpoint’s platform, Snowflake is able to implement more granular governance controls, providing a better view of the data landscape, and classification capabilities.
“Proofpoint’s DSPM platform gives our teams the visibility and intelligence we need to manage and gain a deeper understanding of our data security posture,” said Sandeep Chandana, Senior Director, Machine Learning, Snowflake. “Its data classification and risk insights enable us to enforce least privilege access and strengthen governance across our environment to help customers ensure their data is easy, connected, and trusted.”
Availability
The solution is also designed to support Proofpoint’s recent integration of Normalyze, reinforcing our commitment to helping organizations scale their data security strategies without compromising operational efficiency.
The new capabilities are expected to be globally available by the end of August 2025.
Join us at RSAC 2025 and visit booth #6345 to learn more about these innovations firsthand and how Proofpoint is revolutionizing data security.
For more information on this announcement, please register for our upcoming webinar on May 7, 2025.
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About Proofpoint, Inc.
Proofpoint, Inc. is a leading cybersecurity and compliance company that protects organizations’ greatest assets and biggest risks: their people. With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint helps companies around the world stop targeted threats, safeguard their data, and make their users more resilient against cyber attacks. Leading organizations of all sizes, including 85 percent of the Fortune 100, rely on Proofpoint for people-centric security and compliance solutions that mitigate their most critical risks across email, the cloud, social media, and the web. More information is available at www.proofpoint.com.
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Proofpoint is a registered trademark or tradename of Proofpoint, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.