When choosing a DMS and third-party vendors to work with, security matters:

• Can you identify and control who has access to your system, what data sets are being accessed, and when data can be accessed?
• Is your vendor keeping you compliant with government and industry regulations and legislation?
• Is your vendor focused on minimizing your risks associated with data movement and storage?

Keeping Up with Regulations
Compliance with state and federal law is very real—for dealers, OEMs and industry vendors. Because of the complexity of technology, dealers should expect DMS providers to understand the changing legislation and work towards keeping systems compliant. Here are just a few examples of regulations impacting security enhancement.

• As of 2008, 17 states have passed 25 laws pertaining to data access, protecting dealer and consumer data.
• Over the past several years, data breach notification legislation has been passed by 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
• At the federal level, the Safeguards Rule of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act protects confidentiality and integrity of personal consumer information.
• The Sarbanes Oxley Act forced an increased focus on information technology controls for publicly-held companies.

Reynolds has prioritized focus on keeping your systems compliant, and importantly, we have the resources to stay on top of the constantly-changing environment.

Minimizing Dealer Risk
Reynolds is helping protect dealers using Reynolds systems by maintaining system integrity with solid business rules for secure, monitored, and supported access.

For several years Reynolds offered dealers a Data Security Check to monitor system access by modem. In some real-life dealership situations:

• Up to 73% of CPU time was consumed by non-Reynolds software running silently on the dealership's system, severely limiting system performance.
• We discovered more than 100 third parties were accessing a dealership system without the dealer’s permission.
• Corrupted dealer data was causing errors with printing, prompts, and calculations.
• User sessions were not properly closed by third parties, interfering with business operations when dealership personnel were locked out due to no available user sessions.
• Nightly utility jobs were not executing, preventing daily and monthly accounting functions, printing, back-up, storage, and re-sizing of storage to operate properly.
• Unauthorized access to applications, data, and print jobs was leading to theft of dealership personnel identities.
• Dealerships' vehicle sales data was sold without their knowledge.

Modems historically were used for dealer-to-factory communications and for remote support and system updates. Now most manufacturers have discontinued modem use, and Reynolds has also moved forward with communication solutions which are more convenient, less expensive, and more secure.