Sumit Dhawan, CEO, Proofpoint
| Photo Credit:
Barak Shrama
Proofpoint, a cybersecurity and compliance company, has announced that it will deliver its human-centric cybersecurity platform via a local data centre in Mumbai, with initial offerings starting in the third quarter of 2025.
This move, the company’s CEO said, comes in response to India’s evolving data compliance regulations, prompting the company to provide its solutions via a sovereign data centre in India.
The infrastructure will be a hybrid of co-located data centres and public cloud services with phased availability over the next three months.
“India is not just a key market for Proofpoint, but a hub of innovation, talent, and opportunity. Our commitment to India is long-term – we’re investing in a data centre, forging local partnerships, expanding our footprint, and building world-class capabilities to support and secure the region’s digital future,” said Sumit Dhawan, Proofpoint’s CEO.
On the other hand, cybersecurity spending in India is growing faster than overall IT spending, with increased interest in AI-led and behavior-focused solutions.
According to Proofpoint, for the financial sector in India, the first half of 2024 alone saw a 175% surge in phishing attacks compared to the same period the prior year.
The enforcement of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) has further heightened this urgency, driving the need for a multi-layered, human-centric security strategy that integrates AI-driven threat detection, robust email protection, comprehensive data protection, including data loss prevention (DLP), and strong governance frameworks.
The new data centre will expand compliance options and support data sovereignty requirements, particularly for banking and public sector organisations.
Dhawan continued, “Indian enterprises could not use our tech because they have sovereign requirements. That was our goal with this development. The centre will be available to any customer based out of India or in a region that is comfortable having the data center and data being in India. We will also have no issues in terms of scale. Indian enterprises and governments can rely on our service offering in a sovereign fashion. We are also a fairly elastic system because we leverage a combination of our infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure.”
The CEO shared that Proofpoint has scaled its India presence from zero to 250 employees and extended team members within just six months. The company aims to double this headcount over the next year and potentially quadruple it within two to three years. With a global workforce of 5,000, the India center is projected to become Proofpoint’s largest hub outside the United States.
Published on July 29, 2025