Challenge
Agilent’s goal of implementing and maintaining DMARC enforcement was a tedious journey that required significant overhead, effort, and time from the IT team.
Solution
Valimail Enforce enabled Agilent to automate and streamline its SPF and DMARC management, saving the IT team time and resources.
Results
With Valimail Enforce, Agilent’s DMARC enforcement identified and stopped 200,000 suspicious senders from using the company’s domain, enabling the company to deliver on the goal of providing employees and customers with confidence that emails from the company domain are legitimate.
The business
For more than two decades, Agilent Technologies has been a leader in the life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets. Agilent’s expertise and trusted collaboration give customers confidence in the company’s solutions. With phishing attacks on the rise and email as the backbone of the company’s communications, Agilent wanted to adopt DMARC enforcement so it could extend this emphasis on confidence and trust to the safety and security of its email.
Challenge
With a diverse set of products and services, as well as global operations, Agilent had deployed a significant number of email domains and subdomains throughout the years. In the midst of this environment, Agilent was also experiencing phishing attacks that were becoming increasingly worrisome.
“We had a handful of incidents where employees received an email that appeared to be an urgent wire transfer request from an executive. To the untrained eye, they looked like legitimate emails coming from an Agilent email address. We knew we needed a way to stop people from sending email attacks to our employees and to our customers that appeared to come from Agilent,” said Scott Moore, Messaging Service Manager, Agilent Technologies.
Agilent is a Microsoft 365 customer, so Moore wanted to pursue phishing protection that would enhance the company’s Microsoft investment. “Microsoft helps protect our email from spam and malware, and they’ve added some capabilities to check email authentication. We wanted to enhance that with an approach to set up SPF and DMARC authentication for our email infrastructure,” said Moore.
Agilent initially pursued a manual, in-house approach to DMARC enforcement. This process required significant overhead and resources from Moore and the IT team. Even after bringing in another DMARC vendor, change management remained time consuming and tedious. “Facilitating the SPF and DMARC administration took a lot of spreadsheet management and was a time-consuming effort. Plus, every time there was an email change request, we had the daisy chain effect where we had to work with multiple teams to implement the change and then validate that it was done correctly,” said Moore.
Ultimately, the IT team decided it was time to look at other options that would streamline their email authentication efforts and eliminate the resource requirements.
“With Valimail, the entire management of our email sending services is now a highly efficient process. The solution made it easy to stop the risks of unauthorized senders and to get our email to a state of trust that emails received from our domains are legitimate. It’s also amazing how quick and easy it is with Valimail to handle new requests for email sending applications.”
Scott Moore ,
Messaging Service Manager
Solution
On its search for a solution, Agilent wanted to prioritize an approach that works well with its Microsoft 365 investment. “We knew that by looking at options within the Microsoft security ecosystem, we would get a better end-to-end security suite of services,” said Moore. Perfectly timed for this investigation, Agilent received an email from Microsoft that discussed the values of getting on a path to a DMARC “reject” policy and highlighted the Microsoft partnership with Valimail to help organizations achieve this goal.
Agilent evaluated the free Valimail DMARC Monitor™ offering and immediately saw the value it provides in simplifying the whole email authentication process. After a few months of experience with this product, the company upgraded to Valimail Enforce™. “I showed our leadership the daily process we had been managing and, in contrast, how fast and simple Valimail makes things. Within three seconds, they were convinced of Valimail’s value. With Valimail, email authentication is so much easier, cleaner, and safer, and it is definitely a huge win for our organization,” said Moore.
Results
With Valimail, Agilent now has a single pane of glass for email authentication management with 100% visibility and instant SPF and DMARC management. “Valimail’s detailed reporting makes it incredibly easy to see when something new has occurred, such as a new DKIM key in a domain that needs to be added to Enforce. With Valimail, the entire management of our email sending services is now a highly efficient process,” said Moore.
Within the first 30 days of adopting the solution, Valimail identified approximately 200,000 suspicious emails sent from more than 100 countries, all “from” Agilent domains. Valimail made it fast and efficient to stop these unauthorized senders, while also avoiding inadvertently blocking legitimate emails when Agilent moved to DMARC enforcement.
“In hindsight, our journey to DMARC could’ve been so much faster if we’d adopted Valimail from the start. Valimail lets you get to DMARC reject within months. The solution made it easy to stop the risks of unauthorized senders and to get our email to a state of trust that emails received from our domains are legitimate. It’s also amazing how quick and easy it is with Valimail to handle new requests for email sending applications,” said Moore.
