In June 2024, dealerships all across North America were reminded of just how much their businesses depend on software.
CDK Global, a major provider of dealership management systems, suffered cyberattacks that forced its systems offline and disrupted operations at dealerships across the continent. The company served more than 15,000 retail locations in North America, although the extent of the impact varied between dealerships.
For many affected dealers, everyday tasks suddenly became difficult or impossible to complete through their usual systems. Sales paperwork, financing processes, service operations and other workflows were disrupted. Some dealerships resorted to handwritten orders and manual processes to keep business moving.
At one Michigan dealership, nearly 100 vehicles sold during a promotion were awaiting formal handover because the usual paperwork system was unavailable.
Dealerships were still selling vehicles. But without access to the systems they relied on, completing transactions became slower, more complicated and more labour-intensive.
The incident exposed an important question for every dealership owner:
How much control do you really have over the data and software your business depends on?
The hidden risk of depending on a single provider
Modern dealerships rely on technology for almost every part of their operations. Inventory management, customer records, sales leads, service scheduling, financing workflows and reporting may all depend on interconnected software systems.
These tools make dealerships more efficient. They reduce manual work, organize information and help staff serve customers.
But convenience can come with a trade-off.
When essential systems are controlled by an external provider, your ability to access your own business information may depend on that provider’s infrastructure, availability, policies and recovery process.
An outage, cyberattack, technical failure or account issue can affect your business even when your own computers and local network are working normally.
This doesn’t mean every cloud service is inherently risky or that third-party software should be avoided. Cloud platforms can offer excellent security, reliability and convenience.
The important distinction is whether you understand your dependencies and have a practical way to recover when something goes wrong.
If your website, customer information and business workflows all depend on services outside your control, it’s worth asking what would happen if one of those services became unavailable tomorrow.
Who really owns your dealership’s data?
Data ownership is about more than having your business name on a database.
It means understanding where your information is stored, who can access it, how you can retrieve it and what options you have if you decide to change providers.
Consider the information your dealership uses every day:
- Vehicle inventory: Your listings, descriptions, photographs, specifications and pricing.
- Customer information: Records and contact details collected through your website and business operations.
- Sales leads: Enquiries, form submissions and the history of customer interactions.
- Website content: Pages, articles, branding, layouts and other assets that represent your dealership online.
- Business records: Information stored in your management software and the systems connected to it.
These assets have practical and commercial value. They represent work your team has done, relationships you’ve built and information your business needs to operate.
Yet access to data isn’t always the same as control over it.
Can you export your information in a usable format? Can you move to another platform without losing important records? Do you have independent backups? Are you able to access your website files and database if you change hosting providers?
The answers depend on your software, contracts, integrations and hosting arrangements. They should be understood before a disruption forces you to find out the hard way.
Self-hosting: a different approach to control
One way to gain greater control is to use software that you can host in an environment you choose.
With a self-hosted solution, your website or application runs on hosting infrastructure arranged by you or your chosen hosting partner, rather than existing exclusively inside a vendor-controlled SaaS platform.
Depending on the setup, this can give you more flexibility over:
- Where your website and database are hosted.
- How your files and data are backed up.
- Which users and services have access.
- How you integrate with other tools.
- When and how you migrate to different hosting infrastructure.
Self-hosting doesn’t mean you must purchase a physical server and keep it in your dealership. Your hosting could be provided by a commercial hosting company or another managed infrastructure provider.
The key is having greater control over the software and data layer, along with a clear understanding of which external services you still depend on.
Your dealership website is part of the equation
Your website is often the first point of contact between your dealership and a prospective customer. It showcases your inventory, generates enquiries and helps establish trust in your business.
That makes control of your website important, too.
A website built on a platform that restricts access to its underlying files, database or content can make changing providers unnecessarily difficult. Depending on the platform, migrating away may mean rebuilding significant portions of the site or finding ways to extract information from a proprietary system.
WordPress offers a different approach. It is an open-source content management system that can be installed on hosting infrastructure you control.
Your website’s content and database can remain within your chosen hosting environment, and you can work within a broad ecosystem of themes, plugins and integrations.
This doesn’t automatically make every WordPress website portable or secure. Poorly configured hosting, proprietary plugins and inadequate backups can still create problems. However, WordPress gives site owners flexibility that can be valuable when planning for the long term.
For independent dealerships, that flexibility means you can build your online presence around your business rather than making every future decision around the limitations of a closed platform.
What about your dealership management system?
The same principles apply to dealership management software.
A DMS can become deeply embedded in daily operations. The more processes it supports, the more important it becomes to understand how your data is stored and what happens if you need to change systems.
Before choosing a DMS, consider asking:
- Can I access and export my data without unreasonable restrictions?
- What happens to my information if I cancel my subscription?
- Can I arrange my own hosting, or must the application run on the vendor’s infrastructure?
- How frequently are backups created, and how can they be restored?
- Which functions stop working if the vendor experiences an outage?
- Which integrations depend on external services?
- What would migrating to another system involve?
There is no single answer that fits every dealership. A fully managed DMS may be the right choice for a business that wants to minimize its infrastructure responsibilities. A self-hosted system may be attractive to a dealer who values greater control and flexibility.
What matters is making that choice deliberately, with a clear picture of the trade-offs.
The goal isn’t to eliminate every third-party dependency. It’s to avoid unnecessary dependence on systems you cannot control or recover from.
Ownership doesn’t replace security
There is an important caveat: hosting your own software does not make you immune to cyberattacks or outages.
A self-hosted website can still be compromised. A server can fail. A hosting provider can experience downtime. An administrator can accidentally delete data. Ransomware can damage connected systems and backups.
In some cases, a professionally managed cloud service may have stronger security and recovery capabilities than a small business could reasonably maintain on its own.
That’s why data control must go hand in hand with good security practices.
Cyber Security experts recommend maintaining multiple backups, keeping copies offline and testing recovery procedures regularly. Its guidance also emphasizes that organizations remain responsible for protecting their data, including when third-party providers are involved.
For a dealership, a sensible resilience plan should include:
- Regular backups: Back up your website, databases and other critical business information at an appropriate frequency.
- Independent copies: Keep backups separate from your primary systems, including offline or otherwise isolated copies where appropriate.
- Tested recovery: Periodically restore backups to confirm that they actually work.
- Strong access controls: Use unique passwords, multifactor authentication where available and limited administrative permissions.
- Timely updates: Keep your operating systems, applications, themes and plugins patched.
- A continuity plan: Know how staff will handle essential tasks if key systems become unavailable.
It’s also worth documenting your external dependencies. Your website may be self-hosted while email, payment processing, inventory feeds or lead delivery still rely on third-party services.
Understanding those connections helps you plan realistically for disruption.
Self-hosting gives you options. Preparation helps you use them.
Don’t wait for an outage to think about recovery
The CDK Global incident wasn’t a reminder that dealership technology is unnecessary. Quite the opposite: it demonstrated how essential that technology has become.
When an entire business relies on software, the ability to access, protect and recover its information becomes a business continuity issue, not merely an IT concern.
Dealership owners don’t need to abandon cloud services or manage every technical detail themselves. They do need to understand what they are depending on, who controls their data and how they would respond if a critical provider went offline.
That means reviewing your contracts, understanding your export options, maintaining reliable backups and choosing software that gives you an appropriate level of control.
Most importantly, it means making these decisions before an emergency.
Take control of your dealership’s online presence with Dealer.ms
At Dealer.ms, we believe dealerships should have the flexibility to build and manage their online presence on their own terms.
Dealer.ms is a dealership management solution built for WordPress, bringing dealership functionality into an established, extensible website platform. With a self-hosted WordPress approach, you can choose your hosting environment and retain greater control over your website’s files, database and content, subject to your configuration and the services you use.
Rather than building your entire online presence around a closed website platform, you can work within the WordPress ecosystem and choose the tools and integrations that fit your business.
Every dealership has different requirements, and self-hosting still requires appropriate security, maintenance and backup practices. But having more control over your technology can give you greater flexibility as your business grows and changes.
The lesson from June 2024 is straightforward: don’t wait for a critical system to go offline before asking who controls your data.
Your dealership’s data is a business asset. Choose software that helps you stay in control of it.
Explore Dealer.ms to learn more about building your dealership website on WordPress.