From DLP to Email protection: Proofpoint’s growth in Asia Pacific

Proofpoint recently opened its first regional headquarters and international hub for advanced AI capabilities development in Singapore.

While Proofpoint has been in the APAC region for nearly a decade, the last three years have seen the cybersecurity vendor record exponential growth in the region. As businesses look to ramp up their cybersecurity, the need to support them in the region has also been increasing.

Given the growth in the region, Proofpoint recently opened its first regional headquarters and international hub for advanced AI capabilities development in Singapore. The new office will host several several functions including engineering, sales, marketing, HR as well as a dedicated AI Research & Development team.

The new Singapore office will also enable regional customers to adopt Proofpoint’s industry-leading human-centric cybersecurity platform to combat the growing challenges posed by AI-enabled threats. The AI Research & Development team currently comprises more than 20 specialized professionals, including AI researchers, software engineers, big data engineers, and cybersecurity experts.

CRN Asia caught up with George Lee, Senior Vice President, APJ at Proofpoint to understand more about their plans for the region as well as how the cybersecurity vendor is working with its partners to serve its customers.

Can you tell us a bit more about Proofpoint’s growth in the region?

In Asia, we are growing three times faster primarily for two reasons. First is the explosion of GenAI which is driving the growth of security. We are now seeing threats that's written with Gen AI that are so real that you will not be able to tell it's actually a non-legitimate email. So that has filled a big part of phishing. Email protection is what we call people protection.

Second is the explosion of cryptocurrency. As you know, all sorts of breaches and attacks, ransomware and such, are after money, right? And with the explosion of crypto as currency, there's technically no identity to it. Cybercriminals can transfer money all over the place and get to. So that has been the two main factors that we've seen driving exponential growth for Proofpoint’s services, especially in Asia Pacific and Japan.

Outside of people protection, our data loss prevention set of business has been growing. It's the fastest growth within the company, primarily because of the use of AI and large language modeling. Our data loss prevention solution largely focuses on context and intent. We will always think about how we block an anomaly, based on intent.

Our DLP, our data loss prevention solution, has a whole different spectrum of how we look at things. We think at this point, there's no other vendor that is really using AI and language models to drive intent. And that has been exponential.

At the same time, regulators have played a big part in the whole DLP push. Regulators will want to understand when you have a breach, what do you lose? That has also fueled a lot of growth.

In terms of markets, we’re seeing growth in a lot more established markets like Australia. The DLP push is massive, especially in the regulated industry like oil and gas, telco and financial services.

In the emerging regions, like for example, outside of Singapore, the rest of ASEAN like Thailand, Philippines, they lag a bit but will get there. We are also seeing a lot of growth in Japan around DLP, primarily on a specific use case around internal tracks. Not so much from actual trading data post-attack, but rather more internal tracks.

How is your channel ecosystem contributing to the growth of the region?

Proofpoint in the Asia Pacific region is 100% channel friendly. We believe in driving the ecosystem with our channel partners for two reasons. First, for enterprise customers, if you look at the top of the pyramid, most of the customers will want a brand like OEM to talk to them directly. Which isn’t a problem as that is what we are doing. But however, when it comes to transacting the deal, we are always going to be transacting through our channel partner that we believe in. That's the way for us to grow the ecosystem.

Second, the channel partner plays a major part in our strategy in the midmarket segment. The reality is the midmarket segment will see an exponential gain. So, channel partners are extremely crucial for us in that space. Because in that market segment, most of the customers there will prefer a no-touch or low-touch model. That means I buy, I deploy, you manage. So, that's where we believe our channel partner ecosystem plays the biggest part.

The midmarket is where the highest growth is. But we are also working with channel partners at the top end of the market, in terms of transacting the deal.

Proofpoint also made a few acquisitions recently. Can you tell us a bit more about these.

In 2022, we acquired Dathena. If you look at AI in cybersecurity, it has been one of the biggest innovators. Traditionally, cybersecurity play is always signature-based, or we call it semantic-based type detections. Right now, with the rise of AI, with the large language model, we are building a very specific language model in terms of detection for intent.

We always pride ourselves as the only company around human-centric security. Everything we build in terms of language model focuses on human behavior, on how humans use the data. So, the whole Dathena acquisition focuses on that. And this particular acquisition that we did also helps us with other levels because we're not just driving a single language model for threat detection.

We have an ensemble of about nine different language models. From threat detection to isolating threats to understanding the data that the threats are targeting. So, that has been something that has widened across our stack of portfolio.

Another acquisition was Normalyze in 2024. Normalize is a Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solution. So, there's another space that we believe tied very closely to our data protection stack or the data risk prevention stack. Again, to understand what kind of data is sitting in cloud structure or unstructured. It doesn't matter across multiple clouds.

Normalyze can go across everything, including cloud, like for example, Alibaba Cloud. We can make it work in Alibaba Cloud and that's one of the great advantages. Because a lot of tools these days, they focus either American or non-American, right? Our tech, while we don't largely publicize it that way, we cut across.

As organizations are moving to consolidate their cloud and security services, how is Proofpoint dealing with this?

Consolidation is something that all customers are looking at right now and it's a cycle. We see customers that are going full outsource, full cloud, and then hybrid, and then back on-premises. It's going to depend on the data stack.

We see it as an opportunity. When data is moved across cloud or data moved back on-prem, we kind of understand where this is. And once you understand that, you can treat it the right way, whether you want to treat it as classified information, you want to make sure that you put a DLP strategy on top of it, or you want to put an internal track strategy on it, that this set of data is being moved across different places.

So, I believe this is going to be also a big part of how customers look at data going forward.

While Proofpoint’s growth plans have been positive, what’s the biggest challenge for customers right now?

I would say the biggest challenge we see today is the amount of local startup vendors with point solutions. This region is price sensitive, especially in ASEAN. A lot of times, sometimes good is good enough. A lot of customers say, "I like the solution, but good is good enough.”

But what they don't see is, we can't keep explaining to them, a lot of these target vendors, there's two outcomes. One is if they're really successful, they typically get buyout. If they get a buyout, then your investment with that platform is at whoever owns them.

The other one is that they eventually ran out of funding. Investors will invest in something to start off. But if it's not profitable in 18 to 24 months, the company will typically go down.

So those we see are the biggest, let's just say concern that customers kind of go for a point solution. A lot of customers do know that, but they still come back and say because of the cost component, just because they haven't checked the box. They have to check the box because maybe they have regulatory pressure to do something.

The other concern that we probably have is the amount of GenAI being used which customers don’t know how to correlate. It's tough because there's still organizations that understand the importance of cybersecurity and data security, but there's still a lot of customers in this region that don't. There's still a lot of family-run businesses you look at, for example, in Indonesia that are very traditional, family-owned, conglomerate, doesn't think like a typical corporation.

So those are the ones that we spend a little bit more time working with them, advocating them kind of through the ranks and to the board as well.

So, what is your advice then to these companies that are still unsure, not sure which steps to take in there?

Protect what is most vulnerable. If you look at data today, 90% of the breaches happen through the most basic element, not your firewall, not your advanced persistent attack, nothing like that. It's through basic human engineering, and through phishing. The most basic thing that has happened, that has been around for 20 years, is still the most effective one.

Because at the end of the day, humans are the most vulnerable, right? It's the weakest link, unfortunately, in the attack chain. So, protect those. Once you knock out most of the threats, at least from the most vulnerable, those are the easiest ones to solve. Once you protect those, technically speaking, you knock out a lot of those threats already. So that would be kind of my advice to most companies. They have to have a viable solution.

Lastly, where do you see the future headed then in security, especially in this AI era?

Yeah, so there's two parts of it. So, on the AI detection stack, yes, 100% of the customers should be using it. Secondly, we believe there will be an explosion of agentic AI tools to knock out cases, and to monitor how the AI is doing.

Today, a lot of tools require the AI to do a lot of filtering around threats and such. But how is that being monitored? The agentic AI piece is the one that's supposed to come in and help it, but nobody is monitoring it. So, I believe that will be the biggest growth in the next 18 to 24 months. We will see the rise of agentic AI and the protection of agentic AI as well as how agentic AI is being used and monitored across different companies.