Spearheading growth at Turkey’s largest E-commerce company

Trendyol burst onto the Turkish e-commerce market in 2010 with a mission to make fashion accessible to everyone. Twelve years on, the organization is now the country’s largest digital-only retailer, serving more than 30+ million shoppers and delivering more than one million packages per day, from groceries to clothes. The Chinese multinational e-commerce provider Alibaba holds an 86.5% stake in Trendyol.

Trendyol has benefited from a surge in online buying in Turkey, which jumped 66% last year, according to the Turkish trade ministry. Trendyol’s gross merchandise value, a measure of the products it sells on its platform, has grown by about 20 times in the past three years and is on track to hit $10 billion.

This explosive growth is not without its challenges, however. Data and users are growing relentlessly. New devices are joining the network almost continually. Trendyol’s IT team is adopting modern technologies like cloud, big data analytics, machine learning, and automation to accelerate delivery of new e-commerce services. Meanwhile, the applications that staff use are increasingly accessible anytime, anywhere. The result is a progressively complex network. But where there is complexity, there is risk.

One area where risk manifests itself is network security. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant number of Istanbul headquarters staff working from home, with as many as 2,000 Trendyol staff working remotely and thus requiring secure, seamless access to the network. However, the existing firewall platform was unable to consistently provide that visibility, access, and network protection.

Emircan Kurtkan, System Engineer at Trendyol, picks up the story. “The previous firewall platform was insufficient and could not provide the integrations needed. All attempts to resolve the issue failed, and we took the decision to switch to a new firewall partner.”

In response to this secure VPN connectivity challenge, Trendyol turned to Palo Alto Networks. The overarching requirements for the new firewall were to protect the mobile workforce, enhance network security, and safeguard the network from cyberattacks. At a more granular level, the requirements included:

• Identify users and enable appropriate access.
• Safely enable all applications and control functions.
• Close dangerous policy gaps.
• Stop advanced threats to prevent successful cyberattacks.
• Maintain consistent access control and policy across clouds, on-premises, remote, and mobile networks.
• Automate routine tasks and focus on the threats that matter.

Trendyol has standardized on two clusters of Palo Alto Networks ML-Powered Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) to prevent known and unknown threats. The scalable, high-performance platform classifies applications, threats, and content and then ties that traffic to the Trendyol user, whether they are working at home or headquarters.

Crucially, the ML-Powered NGFWs ensure rapid remote access VPN connectivity—an issue the incumbent firewall solution struggled to deliver. Integration between Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect™ network security and identity provider extends the ML-Powered NGFWs to provide multi-factor authentication for all users—regardless of location.

Kurtkan explains, “Devices with the GlobalProtect app automatically establish a secure VPN connection to the ML-powered NGFW. This way, we have full visibility of all network traffic and applications regardless of ports.”

This agile, adaptive network security is complemented by Palo Alto Networks Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS).

The ML-Powered NGFWs are a cornerstone of Trendyol’s retail growth strategy. Customers and staff can engage with the e-commerce platform, free from the threat of cyberattack. The ML-Powered NGFWs proactively prevent successful attacks, use automation and analytics to reduce manual effort, and leverage innovations using many other security services to strengthen and simplify security.

Powered post-pandemic-work-from-anywhere strategy

Palo Alto Networks is supporting Trendyol’s post-pandemic remote working strategy with secure, seamless VPN connectivity. The GlobalProtect feature extends the ML-Powered NGFWs to remote staff, understanding application use, associating the traffic with devices, and enforcing tailored security tailored to Trendyol policies.

Eliminated threat exposure with unified visibility

The Palo Alto Networks ML-Powered NGFWs provide complete, intelligent visibility through robust analytics and integration with other parts of Trendyol’s security infrastructure. This way, threats are identified at all points within the cyberattack lifecycle, not just when threats first enter the network.

Enabled security to operate smarter

The Trendyol security team can automate hitherto manual tasks, liberating resources to focus on more strategic, valueadd tasks. For example, the ML-Powered NGFWs can analyze vast amounts of data and then automatically recommend security policies based on what they see across the Trendyol network.

Palo Alto Networks ML-Powered Next-Generation Firewalls embed machine learning directly into the core of the firewall to provide real-time IoT device identification and inline, signatureless attack prevention. Read the recent Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact^™ study on CDSS.