CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers in the U.S. and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks Wednesday. That led to an outage that has continued to impact operations.
For prospective car buyers, that’s meant delays at dealerships or vehicle orders written up by hand. There’s no immediate end in sight, but CDK says it expects the restoration process to take “several days” to complete.
Maybe I’m being silly because I’m not in IT, but it would seem to me that one of the ways to avoid this sort of thing happening would be a diverse array of software to choose from rather than everyone using the same one. I don’t think compatibility should be an issue any more than it is for OpenOffice to be able to open Microsoft Word files. We’re not generally talking about complex interactions here, are we? It’s usually database info that can’t be access, isn’t it? But I don’t hear about diversification as a solution.
Please do explain to me what I’m missing because I feel like I’m missing something.
All major car franchises have their own systems. I’ve been away from car dealerships for a while now but they all use similar systems and for the most part the cheapest service is always the choice. The dealerships all have differing but competent standards when dealing connections to the cooperate head quarters but everything else is a crap shoot of poorly considered decisions driven by cost and only cost. Not that the hole that the crooks used were probably through the a dealership but its possible since I know how obtuse certain groups are at dealerships.
Ah we cross paths again…
Nope the bosses want us to use one of the largest platforms because those are the best supported… usually
Also security; in many places, IT is a cost rather than being seen as an investment… car dealers want a nice building because that attracts people— fsck IT, it doesn’t attract people to buy cars…
There are a lot of industries that have niche software needs. It’s hard for a competitor to break in because the market is only so big and it’s better to have something standard and time tested.
Interoperability is often limited to a one-time database migration, and often requires a specialist to do a lot of the transfer manually.
I don’t know if that’s the case with this software because it’s not my industry, but I’ve dealt with similar issues. You’d be surprised how much of the world still runs on AS/400