Mutlu Ataç, our Executive Board Member Responsible for Sales and Operations, made statements to BT Haber about cloud technology systems and Bulutistan's future goals.

I have been involved in the Bulutistan organization since the day it was founded. There is an example I have given since the beginning. When your heartbeat accelerates, you feel it in your veins, and I felt every moment of my 7-year Bulutistan life in my veins. This is my 25th year of dealing with technology in my professional life. I look at the point we have reached and I am hopeful and happy. Data is the most valuable value of the new century and it is more valuable than money. There are regulations in all countries. But it is not decentralized. This is actually Turkey's main problem with regulation. There is EMRA, CMB, ICTA, BRSA, PDPL. In Turkey, there are regulatory bodies and there are regulatory bodies and there is confusion. I am hopeful, and I say this regardless of the legal conjuncture. The Digital Office of the Presidency, Ali Taha Koç and his team are working well on this issue. Let me give some information from the public sector. Even if any ministry in the public sector has a budget, when it says 'I will establish a data center', it has to get approval from the Digital Solution Office. If it is going to work above a certain investment budget, approval from the Digital Solution Office is a must. The Digital Transformation Office is doing some regulatory work starting with information security. Regulation and confusion will be resolved in the next phase. The other sensitive issue is what will happen to the personnel when we move to the cloud. You need to be above a certain level of intelligence to be an IT person or a manager at this level.

Customer priorities are changing
We are valuable personnel. You take valuable personnel and use them for non-valuable operational tasks such as turning the virtual server on and off, whether they have accessed the network or not. However, these valuable personnel can be evaluated at critical points of the company in the visionary works of companies or public institutions about the future, and they can be more productive. I have never seen a company reduce its staff because it switched to the cloud. At the end of the day, the cloud does not work by itself. Last year we asked our customers, 'Why did you prefer the cloud?' Usually when I ask this question, everyone says 'cost', but this time the number one answer was 'flexibility'. Because everything is urgent. The most important issue for CIOs is flexibility and our customers taught us this. Secondly, they said "speed". The third one is an interesting title. Flexibility ranked 56 percent, speed 40 percent, and independence and freedom 36 percent. They do not want to be dependent on the manufacturer. Cloud is a freer area compared to local investments. The standards are more or less clear. Today you are in this cloud, tomorrow you can move to another cloud. Our customers put 'cost' in the last place.

So is the cloud safer or on-prem? Is it safer to put a few gold bars in a safe deposit box at home or in a safe deposit box at the bank? It is true that at this level, at the scale on this table, very serious investments in on prem are made consciously and experienced. But go down a bit and there are companies that don't know what a firewall is. We organized a 'cloud in public sector' event in Ankara. One of the questions is; how ready is the public sector for secure cloud? This is how we look at security. Network at the bottom. Then there are five main topics: system security, application security, data security, and user security outside the cloud. The weakest link is 'user security'. We agree that we need to look holistically like this.

Bulutistan is a technology company invested by Sabancı Holding through Ak Portfolio. Our campus is in Altunizade. We provide end-to-end services together with Sabancı DX, especially under the title of security. There are security services ready in the cloud. But application security, data security and end-user security are the weak links in the cloud. These need to be improved and these will improve over time.

We no longer look at the world from the virtual machine window. The world we now call Cloud 2.0 is the world of containers, microservices, DevOps and SecOps. We have DevOps and SecOps teams within ourselves. We develop products and provide services to our customers here. We have services under the title of microservice transformation consultancy. We provide both general and special container services.

Strategic steps should accelerate further
Right now, there is a service that is being done for the first time with us. They started working on the same Amazon logic we know at the bottom. We will probably go live soon. There will be a logic of scaling according to CPU, memory and network.

Finally, I would like to say this: We will go to the cloud. There is no situation where we need to brake. However, while going to the cloud, we cannot talk about full cloud at this level. The concept we will talk about today at this level is hybrid cloud. On the way to this hybrid cloud, companies will emerge that will mediate in terms of cloud transformation. These are the companies we knew as 'system integration' in the past. In the new world, these will evolve towards 'cloud brokerage'. This transformation has begun and we will continue to progress here. There are more than 50 integration companies brokering in Bulutistan's infrastructure. They offer and explain our products and services to their customers. The broker world will grow in the future and this is one of the very important issues.

Lastly, we talked about access redundancy. We are developing SLA in all our infrastructures to be ready for this level. When I was a child, we had a black and white television in our house. There was an on-off volume button on it. There is no possibility of breaking the TV. I would stretch my hand towards the TV, my mother would hit my hand and say 'you will break it'. The children whose hands were hit that day are the managers of companies today. We are the opportunity for the future of this country. We inherited this country from our children. We need to be more decisive, more persistent, and boldly make strategic moves that will take the country further into the future. Technology is the most important element in front of these. The pandemic accelerated this, but we can accelerate it even more. I think there is a need for this to accelerate even more.