Disrupting a 50-year reliance on aging Dealer Management System platforms, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive retail platform, Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC). This transformative dealership software platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, ARC is simplifying the dealer/consumer relationship and journey. Founded in the Silicon Valley, Tekion employs over 1,000 innovators globally.

Tekion’s diverse multi-cloud application offering automates the end-to-end transportation dealer’s operations. Securing Tekion DMS to harden customers’ service, parts, ordering, showroom, payroll, and all other applications is a lynchpin in driving company growth. Keeping every aspect of the dealership securely running on time and without exposing any dangerous threat vectors was the first primary goal. To achieve this stance, Tekion’s IT team established an ambitious onboarding automation that covers all cloud applications through back-end integrations. This initiative began with securing user email and expanded into DKIM, antivirus, and Mimecast’s Secure Email Gateway (SEG).

The second primary goal was to unify cloud security across multiple file-sharing platforms, including DropBox, OneDrive, and O365. There are literally thousands of file collaboration requests both internally and through external clients, requiring the unified security of Clearedin’s platform to prevent dangerous phishing exploits, supply chain attacks including ATO and BEC. Many global customers’ entire back office operations rely upon the secure deployment of Tekion’s cloud application and API suite. Clearedin supports this entire ecosystem through complete multi-cloud collaboration protection.

A critical element in Tekion’s IT buildout is automating the onboarding of staff and customers with a compliance-first mindset. Since the Tekion cloud platform powers the back-end of automotive dealers, it presents an extremely attractive attack surface for malicious exploits. At stake: vehicle sale transactions, service records, parts invoices, and customer data and transactions, not to mention staff payroll details. By creating a unified view of user cloud application activity, Clearedin helps Tekion through powerful Machine Learning, AI, and the visibility of a scalable Trust Graph to proactively manage multi-cloud risks.

The IT team began to see scattered security incident reports, with social engineering root causes among the largest concerns. Examples included spoofed sent invoice and payment received emails. Prior to Clearedin, Tekion addressed these emerging needs with several existing Microsoft solutions. While Microsoft security applications helped identify up to 1,000 attacks weekly, the team believed that this was only the tip of the iceberg, and that many more attacks were hitting users and potentially customers. The ability to identify, audit, and ultimately remediate these social engineering threats led the Tekion team to install and widely deploy the Clearedin platform.

Ramping up security and onboarding automation are among Tekion’s top IT initiatives. The company previously leveraged hybrid security but steers clear of the speed bumps inherent in Active Directory, VPN solutions, and on-prem server deployments. A primary use case for Clearedin quickly developed to proactively monitor file sharing without prescriptive user activity. By leveraging Clearedin’s Trust Graph, this approach helps IT identify malicious activity, including BEC and ATO exploits. The Trust Graph also delivers full audit transparency for both users and customers across the Tekion DMS cloud.