Dealers are being urged to take steps to protect their databases from threats such as theft, fire and flood.

Pinewood says that it frequently visits dealerships where no or little effort is made to ensure that crucial information about their business is safe.

“Dealers do, of course, recognise that their data is crucial to their business but a surprisingly proportion take inadequate steps to protect it," said Neville Briggs, managing director.

“For example, dealers may back up data from their server regularly onto tapes or an external hard drive but then never take them off site – meaning they are still at risk from theft but also fire or flood – something which can unlikely but does happen, such as the fire recently at Southampton Audi.

“Another common issue is that dealers back up their data regularly but never run a test to ensure that the information can be properly recovered in the event of an issue arising.”