Data Security and Insight: dmarcian and Your Data

With a passion for data integrity and analysis, Lauren Windsor, dmarcian’s Intelligence Officer, shares her perspectives on intentional data use and DMARC.

We live in a data-driven world. Data is collected constantly, monetized in ways both well-intentioned and malicious, and is always in danger of being made less private than we may have initially intended or been aware was even possible. Data is both a commodity and a necessity in a world that lives more and more in the virtual space and less in the physical. It is our best tool for making responsible decisions, and it can be a subtle enemy supporting entrenched biases, leaving fallible humans unchecked. In short, data can either help you or hurt you, but the best way to ensure it is helpful is to be intentional about what you do with it.

Enter DMARC. In this digital world we find ourselves fighting against security concerns from all sides, but most relevant for our conversation is email, the O.G. internet communication method. Email today is as simple as (maybe even more simple than) snail mail. We type our messages (much faster than writing by hand) then skip the folding, envelope packing and licking, digging through your contacts to find your recipient’s three-line address, scrounging up postage, and waiting. Email is significantly cheaper than physical mail; it is fast, reliable, and convenient. But its biggest downfall: it is easily exploited by those with bad intent.

At dmarcian, we specialize in the resources and know-how to keep your email safe from impersonators and attackers. Through DMARC compliance, you can build your brand integrity and maintain trust with customers and business partners. But in order to get the most out of your subscription, you have to give us access to data—sometimes sensitive data—about your email. You place a lot of trust in us, and we consistently work to earn and keep that trust so you have a partner in the wild, wild west of the web. Here’s how we do that.

Our first priority when you share data with us is to store it as securely as possible. In addition to implementing safe data storage tools through Google Cloud, dmarcian is SOC2 and GDPR compliant. We do not share your data with third parties or sell it (per our Privacy Policy) because we understand that your trust in us is more valuable than the data you share with us. You can trust that the data you send is for your and our eyes only and used exclusively for generating the insights and reporting that empower you to deploy and manage DMARC effectively across your domains.

This leads us to our second priority regarding data shared: ensuring you have access to aggregated and insightful views of your data that allow you to spend as little time as possible maintaining and worrying about DMARC. Once deployed, DMARC should be reviewed regularly through your dmarcian dashboard; our goal is to ensure that any review is as informative and painless as possible. Dashboards facilitate quick understanding so you can take decisive action and move on to other priorities.

In addition to aggregate reporting, we constantly strive to create new resources that shed light on your email landscape. With mechanisms like the DMARC Record Checker and SPF Surveyor, we work to make your email security journey easy. In the future we plan to help you become even more proactive against phishing and impersonation by predicting which of the IP addresses and domains you’ve shared with us are most likely to represent security threats based on their behavior. Aggregated email activity across the web can help us identify relationships between IP addresses and domains linked by fraud, giving you a heads up on which of your domains are most at risk.

Ultimately, data is a resource you generate every day through email. dmarcian can help you protect that data, learn from it, and then get back to your regularly scheduled programming.

We’re here to help people understand DMARC and the data that makes the magic happen, so get in touch with us if you have any questions. You can also check out our platform with no obligation and get assistance from our DMARC reporting platform and helpful team.

Want to continue the conversation? Head over to the dmarcian Forum.