If you’re an auto dealer or supplier, chances are your IT, data, and other critical systems are managed by third-party vendors. And it makes sense: Outsourcing allows you to focus on your business while putting IT and other services in the hands of experts. But you can’t rely on your vendors alone to keep your data secure.
Cyberthreats are rampant, and it just takes a single vulnerability in your network to trickle down and impact the data privacy of your customers and functions of your day-to-day business operations. Without proper security controls, the “what if” scenarios of a cyberattack can quickly become a reality in the event you experience one. And when it happens, your customers aren’t going to be looking at your vendors for answers — it’ll be your responsibility to mend the damage and roll out a disaster recovery plan.
The bottom line: You can’t outsource governance. It’s up to you as an owner or executive to build strong cybersecurity risk management policies into your business processes to avoid and mitigate risk.
The cascading effects of outsourced IT
With cloud computing, IT providers allow auto dealers and suppliers to host critical systems and data in a cloud environment, providing your business easy access to information from a local device or PC. But as an owner or executive, it’s dangerous to assume that shifting the responsibility of managing your IT and critical systems to your providers also shifts the risk away from your business.
You have a responsibility to make cybersecurity an ongoing priority across your organization. Gone are the days when cybersecurity is just a concern for IT — your CEO, CFO, and CIO each have a role to play. Your business strategy, fiduciary resilience, and IT infrastructure are intertwined, and executive collaboration is critical to establish effective cybersecurity controls and governance policies.
Cybersecurity risk management is a process, not an objective
Even if your CEO, CFO, and CIO agree on the importance of investing in your business’s cybersecurity, a one-step solution isn’t going to cut it in today’s threat landscape. Building strong controls and protecting your organization against third-party risk is a continuous process, and constant investment and development in your organization’s cybersecurity maturity is key.
A robust cybersecurity plan doesn’t just protect against the risks of today; hackers are constantly adapting to the cybersecurity landscape, and if you want to protect your long-term security, you need to be a step ahead. And that means embedding your cybersecurity strategy into your business processes and continuously reviewing third-party providers for vulnerabilities so that your controls adapt and grow as your business environment changes.
What does this look like in practice? For starters, your executive team needs to work together to identify existing business systems and dependencies. Who do you rely on? What’s the cost to your business if you or one of your vendors face a cyberattack? Business leaders need to evaluate what the loss of a key vendor and excessive system downtime means for the business.
Finally, performing an independent, tailored risk and resilience assessment of your vendors can help you identify looming threats to your organization’s security and opportunities to adapt your business processes to pursue best practices.
Is your disaster recovery model effective?
But what happens when you don’t have the proper controls in place? What happens when one of your vendors faces an attack, and your data, systems, and business functions are put at risk? Your response to these questions could be the difference between financial ruin and business resilience.
Immediately after a cyberattack, you need to take steps to contain the incident and minimize further damage to your security. This is why ensuring your incident response plan is integrated with your disaster recovery model is nothing short of important. A proper plan complements your disaster recovery strategy, documents the business impact of certain outages, and has a plan in place for manual workarounds and client communications.
Poor integration of disaster recovery and incident response can have serious consequences: Once a bad actor gets a foothold in your vendor’s network, your dealership and customer’s personal data could be vulnerable to follow-up threats, ranging from phishing and impersonation attacks to information leaks on the dark web.
Updating your endpoint protection to be able to detect and isolate capabilities, monitoring your logs for unusual traffic, implementing regular security awareness training for your staff, and ultimately, building out a strategic risk and resilience assessment that defines how your provider is upholding the privacy of your data will help your organization build resiliency against future attacks.
Cybersecurity risk impacts the entire auto value chain
The consequences of a cyberattack don’t occur in a vacuum. A security breach of an auto dealer or supplier affects the entire automotive value chain. And with the rise of cybercrime, you can expect additional regulatory scrutiny from OEMs and automakers on dealers and suppliers in the coming years — which means now’s the time to get ahead.
Whether your customer is a billion-dollar automaker or a first-time car buyer, the cost of a cyberattack is steep and pervasive. Don’t make the mistake of being unprepared — it could cost you your business.
Start a discussion with your executive team today to ensure your cybersecurity risk management plan is holistic and aligned. Download our cybersecurity discussion guide here.
