Cybersecurity company Proofpoint Inc. today unveiled new Microsoft 365 security features meant to get managed service providers and the businesses they look after ready to adopt artificial intelligence tools safely.
The four new features land in the Microsoft 365 security products sold by Proofpoint MSP Platform, the business unit that handles the company’s work with managed service providers and small and midsize businesses. Tenant Risk Exposure maps permission and sharing risks across Microsoft 365 tenants. Email verdicts from the unit’s AI now arrive with an explanation of how they were reached.
Security awareness training has been extended into Microsoft Teams, where an AI coach quizzes employees after they finish a course. The fourth is an AI assistant for partners and administrators, built into their control panel.
Daniel Hofmann, who runs Proofpoint MSP Platform as general manager and executive vice president, said the data and channels an AI tool can reach matter as much as the choice of tool. Overly broad permissions and unclear sharing settings were there before AI arrived, he said, and using the technology “can amplify their impact.”
Tenant Risk Exposure is aimed at administrators who already rely on Proofpoint’s 365 Permission Manager to keep track of access rights in Microsoft 365. The new dashboard shows them, tenant by tenant, where anonymous access and inactive guest accounts have crept in, and a shortcut beside each finding lets them close it off by hand. Remediation can also run automatically.
Security teams reviewing a message in Email Live Tracking will now see why the AI reached its verdict on it. Proofpoint says that should speed up work on the rare false positive.
The AI-powered Security Awareness Service now works inside Microsoft Teams. Employees who finish an e-learning session hear from AI.MY, the unit’s AI Cyber Assistant, acting as a coach.
Its three follow-up questions are pitched at each person’s awareness level, and feedback comes back immediately. Answers go into a knowledge profile that organizations can use to measure learning progress and work out who needs more training.
The AI assistant for partners and administrators lives in 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 on onboarding, configuration and day-to-day security operations.
Managed service providers can also use it to match products to a given customer and find places to extend that customer’s protection. Proofpoint expects that to cut the effort providers put into customer consultations.
Proofpoint closed its $1.8 billion purchase of Hornetsecurity in December, then 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, and the four new features are scheduled to reach them in the fourth quarter.