The ever-growing data economy in the world and in Türkiye makes businesses holding vast amounts of data liable to the growing threat of cyberattacks, which have been relentlessly dominating headlines.

And this is having an impact as effective as the transformation in every sector.

Attacks on e-commerce sites and marketplaces are enough to turn the economy upside down. Although the usage rate is currently low in Türkiye, the damage caused by cyberattacks in the field of mobility continues to grow every year with the rapid increase in the use of electric and autonomous vehicles and micro-mobility vehicles such as scooters.

Digital transformation studies have been making critical industries, from production, marketing, sales to health and education, to bring forward investments in cybersecurity. What is more, domestic and foreign investors investing in cybersecurity initiatives are engaging in a business domain that will not have a shortage of customers in the global market.

Cyberattack every 11 seconds

Reyhan Baylan, the CEO of Applied Value Group Türkiye, which offers services related to investment, management consultancy and social responsibility projects, says a cyberattack takes place in the world every 11 seconds.

"There is an approximately 125% increase in cyberattack cases in a year. These attacks cost companies an average of $4.35 million per data breach. It takes an average of nine months to detect the attack and control the damage. It is possible to prevent these losses by taking precautions before the attack occurs," Baylan noted.

She also detailed their recent investment in CatchProbe Intelligence Technologies Corporation (CatchProbe Incorp.), a Turkish platform developing a new generation of integrated digital intelligence products.

"When we examined the product, we came to the conclusion that the product successfully fulfills the centralized and autonomous platform required by SaaS infrastructure. We have full faith in the entire team, especially the founder Batuhan Tosun. We are sure that the perfectionist structure and work ethic of Tosun, who has achieved great successes at a young age, will carry CatchProbe Incorp. to a much higher level," said Baylan.

Decentralized data

The ever-growing focus on data has been bringing forward the question of where companies should store their data, which is increasingly becoming decentralized.

By 2025, global research firm Gartner predicts that 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside a traditional data center or cloud.

A small fraction of this data is now said to be generated by humans. The majority is produced by machines, sensors and cameras, and most of the time they are not brought to data centers or the cloud. Enterprises are increasing cybersecurity investment to manage this data that is becoming decentralized every day and eliminate security issues.

Companies that fail to manage this change may find it difficult to perform services for governmental institutions. Here the digital world meets the physical world. Many organizations engaged in multiple industries such as retail, manufacturing, transportation or energy production carry out critical aspects of their business at the edge. Gartner defines edge computing as solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation.

Cloud

In other words, when the efficiency and management capability of data-oriented managed businesses increase, cybersecurity risks increase as well. That is why the year 2023 will also be a critical year in terms of tackling cyber threats. Organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud and IT solutions to manage both their own data centers and endpoints.

Again, in the coming year, we will witness customers increasing the use of secure backup solutions to protect data created at the edge, both at endpoints and data centers. In addition, ways will also be sought after to extend data security to endpoints and eliminate the vulnerability of network intrusions at endpoints.

It is not easy for technology giants such as Dell, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft to remotely manage solutions for organizational needs.

$350 billion market

A recent investment by Sabancı DX in a cybersecurity initiative shows that its parent company Sabancı Holding, one of the largest Turkish conglomerates, wants to add cybersecurity to its long-term digital talent pool. This is also important for protecting the strategic investments of the entire company.

With the development of digital technology, the issue of cybersecurity is becoming more important than it has ever been, and will reach a market size of $350 billion at the end of 2026, said SabancıDx General Manager Doğuş Kuran.

Kuran stated that the "Operational Technologies" (OT), which provides security for critical infrastructure networks, is the fastest growing security market domain and said that they have invested therein.

"In order to expand the scope of our work in this field, we have incorporated Radiflow company, which has a global network and is growing rapidly. Radiflow, with more than 100 customers, safeguards more than 6,000 facilities, has operations in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Pacific. We aim to be the solution partner of global companies in the field of cybersecurity," he noted.

Strategic data and cloud

Also evaluating his company’s investment in CatchProbe Incorp., Applied Value Group Chair Bruce Grant said hundreds of their customers around the world, most of them Global Fortune 500 companies, have finally begun realizing that cybersecurity affects all aspects of their business due to possibilities of sophisticated attacks.

"For this reason, we encourage our customers, especially those who have strategic importance, to move their data to the cloud. That’s exactly why we founded RiverMeadow, a Silicon Valley-based cloud migration software company 10 years ago," Grant said.

"In addition, we searched for the world’s most advanced software and consulting solutions in the field of cybersecurity because we sensed the serious need for this sector. Therefore, we have decided to become a partner of CatchProbe and participate along with the board of directors."

Open source

CatchProbe Incorp. offers a solution that eliminates misinformation in cyber intelligence products and meets the need for "webint," which used to be a part of the military domain but also turned into a corporate need after the coronavirus pandemic.

The platform is the only product in the world in the field of integrated centralized digital intelligence solutions that combines open-source intelligence and includes artificial intelligence-based intelligent trap systems.

CatchProbe is focused entirely on developing a single product, said its founder, Tosun. "CatchProbe Incorp., the foundations of which we laid seven years ago, is the world’s first artificial intelligence-driven centralized and autonomous digital intelligence action platform with features and modules. We are a company that operates in the American market as an institution and whose target market is America. Our institution, which is a high-tech company with 100% American origin and accredited by many security authorities, is moving towards becoming a multinational company with a board of directors based in America," he noted.

Tosun also stated that the company is also planning to start operating in Western Europe in the coming period. "Following the launch of our latest version, we are also aiming to develop mobile applications for mobile intelligence security and mobile leak detection. We are continuing the investment processes at the pre-seed stage. We aim to complete the Series A round in 2025 and become one of the largest technology companies in the world by being listed on the New York stock exchange in 2027," he added.

$5 trillion market

Tosun underlined that they appealed to markets in the areas related to cybersecurity, threat intelligence, digital intelligence, cyber intelligence and deception.

"The size of the market we operate in is about $5 trillion. We offer a solution consisting of six modules that can be purchased individually or integrated within the ‘All-in-One Cyber and Digital Intelligence’ platform. With the solution we offer in the SaaS infrastructure, we eliminate the need to invest in any hardware and reduce expenditures by half," he claimed.

He also noted that with the centralized and autonomous solution that the company offers, they also eliminate the specialist and engineer dependence. "By providing verified and actionable intelligence, we block all disadvantages such as false intelligence, irrelevant data, uncorrelated attack analysis and failure to intervene in a timely manner," he noted.

‘Pay as you use’ model

Cloud products that enable fast data transfer, backup and archiving of continuously increasing data, which have turned into a great need, from the public to the private sector, can now be accessed through a single platform.

Türk Telekom, which seeks to help businesses benefit from advantages such as data security, scalability and resource savings through cloud transformation thanks to infrastructure equipped with new technology and delivering better customer experience, is positioning its data center and cloud products under the Türk Telekom Cloud platform.

Fatih Türkoğlu, a product and service management expert at Türk Telekom, says that leading companies and institutions in Türkiye are opting for Türk Telekom cloud services.

"While it is important for corporate customers to strengthen their needs from a technological aspect in their digital transformation journeys in order to decouple from the competition in global and local markets, cloud investments also play an important role in this transformation journey," said Türkoğlu.

"The cloud computing market in Türkiye is estimated to reach $1 billion by 2026, up from $377 in 2021," he said, citing IDC’s market report. The market is estimated to be growing 2.8 times on a foreign currency basis by 2026 compared to 2021.

"As Türk Telekom, we are increasing our investments in this field by supporting the ‘Let Türkiye’s data stay in Türkiye' thesis with the sensitivity of information security and anticipating that cloud transformation is the prerequisite for keeping up with digital transformation," said Türkoğlu.

"Another important factor differentiating our users in the sector is that they pay in Turkish liras with the ‘pay as you use’ model of our state-of-the-art cloud service. With Türk Telekom Cloud, we aim to provide advantages to enterprises in digitalization processes in areas such as cost, flexibility, security and to be by their side in digitalization processes," he noted.