DMARC: 5 Keys to Success

DMARC has been around for 4 years and is steadily growing to include the participation of some of the world’s largest email senders. From a technical perspective, DMARC is embodied within a single DNS record. This post will cover 5 keys to DMARC success from both an organization and enterprise-wide perspective: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a standard email authentication protocol that plays an essential role in any organization’s cyber security arsenal. With a technical understanding of what it is, why you need it and how you can use it to protect your business, you can help maintain a secure cyber environment and stay one step ahead of today’s constantly evolving threats.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a standard email authentication protocol that plays an essential role in any organization’s cyber security arsenal. With a technical understanding of what it is, why you need it and how you can use it to protect your business, you can help maintain a secure cyber environment and stay one step ahead of today’s constantly evolving threats.

DMARC is the most powerful tool at your disposal for eradicating phishing attacks. And the resilience the policy offers your email security program can be achieved in as little as a few hours: by simply setting up a DMARC record that instructs receiving servers to reject unauthenticated emails purporting to be from your domain.

Learn the five keys to success for deploying a successful, enterprise-wide DMARC program. Whether you’re implementing DMARC for a single domain or just a handful of senders, you can expect challenges that test your technical and business knowledge. Learn from the authors how they overcame these challenges as they rolled out DMARC in their own organization and how you can do it too. Implementing DMARC can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Listen as I share five key tips from my colleague Autumn Tyr-Salvia that we’ve learned from helping some of the world’s largest companies implement successful DMARC programs.

I’ll share five of those hard-won lessons today.

DMARC Program Leadership Best Practices

Getting to “reject” enforcement is not straightforward. It’s a combination of policy, infrastructure, tools and people. This document highlights the key decisions that can help you get there. In the battle to secure customer inboxes, DMARC is clearly winning. However, that does not mean there is nothing stopping phishers from taking control of customer email channels. Instead, the real issue is that deploying DMARC is fundamentally a leadership, process, and communication challenge. Two lessons in particular stand out.

1. Communication and Visibility are Key to DMARC Success

2. Lead the Discussion with Business Value, Not Security Hygiene

DMARC Implementation Best Practices

The good news is that there are lessons-learned, and a series of best practices for implementing DMARC that can help you avoid common pitfalls. We’ll explore those together in this article.

1. Get the Right Scope

2. Prioritize Your Domains in Stages

3. Don’t Stop at “p=reject.”

Another Key Lesson: Don’t Go It Alone

The decision to deploy DMARC is an important one. Protect your email domain from Spoofing and Business Email Compromise Phishing. Implement BIMI to put your brand/logo on emails today EmailAuth provides the technical capabilities and workflow management that program leaders need to simplify the complexity of DMARC in the enterprise.