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.
I don’t know much about the market for car dealership software, but I work for a non-profit that deals with environmental remediation. Finding LOB software that meets our needs is an absolute nightmare because it’s so niche. What we can find is either crazy expensive, doesn’t do what we need it to do, is from some terrible fly-by-night vendor, or some combination of those. So when you do find something that mostly meets your needs, you pretty much have to take what you can get.
The government can incentivize or contract out companies to write software, but AFAIK, they can’t compel any company to do so. IANAL, but I would also assume they’d need to stop approving any M&As that may be contributing to market consolidation
You basically nailed it with “pipe dream”.
I guess the only other option would be for the companies to write the software themselves, which they don’t have the time or the money to hire people to do, I’m sure.
Right.
In reality, we’d end up with about a million Access “databases” (or Excel files) getting emailed around, lost, stolen, corrupted, etc (ask me how I know that lol).