Car dealers urged to make data safe from theft, fire and flood

Car dealers are being urged to take steps to protect their databases from threats such as theft, fire and flood.

Dealer management systems specialist Pinewood says that it frequently visits dealerships where no or little effort is made to ensure that crucial information about their business is safe.

Neville Briggs, managing director, explained: “Dealers do, of course, recognise that their data is crucial to their business but a surprisingly proportion take inadequate steps to protect it.

“For example, dealers may back up data from their server regularly onto tapes or an external hard drive but then never take them off site – meaning they are still at risk from theft but also fire or flood – something which can unlikely but does happen, such as the fire last week at Southampton Audi.

“Another common issue is that dealers back up their data regularly but never run a test to ensure that the information can be properly recovered in the event of an issue arising.”

Briggs added that these potential problems were something that Pinewood customers did not need to worry about because their Pinnacle DMS was provided on a SaaS basis – with all software and dealer data held remotely on Pinewood’s servers in highly secure fire and flood protected data centres.

He said: “Part of the SaaS concept is that customers do not need to worry about issues such as data security. We hold the data for hundreds of dealers and ensure that it is afforded the highest levels of protection available, including the ISO27001 international data security standard.”