Last month, the Automotive industry experienced one of the biggest disruptions in history with the CDK Global ransomware hack. For the better part of two weeks, dealerships were at a standstill, unable to access vital systems to transact daily business. Even after the system was restored for all customers, the catchup work involved in manually entering all the business that occurred during the shutdown will take weeks or even months to complete.
During the shutdown, technicians were writing repair orders on post its, timecard machines with inches of dust were pulled from their storage closet crypts to be revived once again and sensitive customer data was being captured on personal smart devices. It was a business environment that more closely resembled a post-apocalyptic comedy film than a multi-billion-dollar industry. What was most shocking about it all was that a lot of these same dealerships had been operating on paper as recently as a couple of years ago, yet all reliance for business operations now rested on digital systems they couldn’t log into.
Non-CDK dealerships enjoyed an influx in business during the shutdown and breathed quiet sighs of relief that it wasn’t their DMS that was hacked. What a lot of dealerships failed to acknowledge is that it could have just as easily been. Automotive News headlines for the past couple of years have been spackled with stories of data and IT security breaches at both the dealership and SaaS (software as a service) levels. Bad actors have heightened their activity and demand higher and higher ransoms for the release of stolen systems. It’s rumored that CDK paid upwards of $25 million to regain access to their systems. Not long after systems were restored, phishing emails were sent to contacts of CDK customers, masked as dealership communications, leaving all dealerships and anyone that does business with them vulnerable to a security breach of their own.
Dealerships need to ensure that they have good IT security policies in place, including regular employee training on how to spot bad actors’ attempts to gain access to your systems. In the event of a disruption, technology-related or otherwise, having a business continuity action plan (BCAP) in place will determine who thrives and who struggles. One component of a BCAP is physical assets for transacting business, specifically forms, those traditional tools you used to purchase monthly but have likely overlooked in recent years.
Keeping a pack of each essential form in a storage closet as a safeguard against business disruptions is relatively inexpensive. In many cases, just a few hundred dollars’ worth of forms can make a significant difference in preventing your dealership from grinding to a halt. Forms like timecards, hand-write repair orders, multi-point inspection forms, credit applications, retail installment agreements, we owes, and odometer disclosures ensure that you are capturing all necessary information in a clean and standardized format for manual entry when your systems are back online. Ensuring your team knows how to utilize these assets is equally as important as having them.
It doesn’t cost much to make sure you can continue to operate smoothly during a disruption, make sure you are prepared by contacting your American Solutions for Business associate today to discuss your dealership’s specific BCAP needs.
For more information, reach out to your sales associate or contact American Solutions for Business at www.americanbus.com
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