CDK Global: Best-In-Class Cloud Management Framework

As pioneers in dealership management software, CDK Global is committed to helping dealerships connect to their customers and grow sales. After more than 40 years, CDK Global now serves more than 30,000 auto, truck, agriculture, construction, marine, and RV dealers across the globe.

With the mission of building stronger and smarter dealerships, CDK Global has been investing in a stronger and smarter organization of their own with new acquisitions, leadership appointments, and with the adoption of AWS Cloud services. 

By transitioning to the cloud, the product development teams were firing on all cylinders and rolling out new product features much faster than before. The next step in the transition was for the operations team to establish the same level of financial control and security as they were accustomed to with their on-premise data centers.  

To address the required level of maturity while maintaining the same speed of productivity, CDK Global needed to establish cloud architecture and cloud governance models for the AWS platform.

In our early assessments, we found that CDK Global has a variety of strong technical teams across the globe with different infrastructure and standards spread across Azure, AWS, and more than 40 on-premise data centers. Given the robust footprint of their operation, the challenge was not only to set up a cloud management framework but to do so on a global scale. 

The other goals we identified during our early collaboration with CDK Global, were to create global cloud policies, enable ways to identify inefficiencies, improve cross-team collaboration, improve the budgeting process for cloud services, and generally, establish a core set of cloud architecture standards and best practices. 

For the first three months, our initial phase of the project focused on designing a cloud governance process. In collaboration with CDK Global teams, we established the guardrails for the use of cloud resources, such as security measures and defined financial controls. 

With documentation in place, we are currently working side by side with CDK Global’s R&D and operations experts to implement a self-service cloud management tool. The tool will enable R&D and operations to collaborate in the cloud while providing the platform hosting team (the guys who pay the bills) the ability to monitor the costs, security measures, and the policy standards that we defined together.