What’s Next for Melih Abdulhayoglu?

Melih took on the giants of the PKI certificate business and bested them, by creating the world’s leading certificate authority.

Now that he has “sent his kid to college,” as he wittily describes the recent sale of a majority stake in Comodo CA Ltd. to tech-focused private equity firm Francisco Partners, many people wrote to us asking, “What will Melih do next?”

No one imagines that Melih will kick back, sit on a beach and enjoy himself. Anyone who knows his history understands he will continue to innovate and disrupt in pursuit of his lifelong ambition to create trust online. The only question is how? So here is a tiny peek into what Melih will be pursuing next.

Melih has been following the rise of website infections and hacks very closely. He sees website security at a stage similar to where computers were in the 1990s. Then, using protection for computers was viewed as not necessarily required, and few people knew how, nor understood the need for it.

But as the digital platform economy has grown, so too have cybersecurity risks. Now, website security has become essential to online trust, and Melih has turned his attention to solving this problem —again!— this time by keeping our websites clean and safe.

The first problem to overcome in his view, surprisingly, comes from a small number of rogue marketing companies who, like circling vultures, build their business models to profit from companies’ problems, instead of protecting them. There is a huge industry that is motivated to see sites get infected, so that they can sell their “cleaning services” for big bucks. Instead of building amazing protection, these companies prey on website owners at their most vulnerable time, when their sites are hacked. There are many examples of these companies scare mongering website owners into buying “cleaning services” even when there is no infection on their site.

In sharp contrast, Melih believes in protecting people before the damage is done. That’s why he led the effort to build cWatch Web — a comprehensive suite of solutions and managed services brings world-class website protection to small, medium and large enterprises.

cWatch is the world’s very first web security platform to combine SIEM, Managed WAF and CSOC on top of CDN. (In this case, a real CDN, unlike other web malware cleaning companies who are providing “non-caching” CDN…the irony!)

• SIEM is the brains of the operation
• WAF is the muscle of the operation
• CSOC are the people who make it all happen
• CDN is making it all fast and efficient

Thanks to innovation and three years of constant research and development, not only did he and his team create the world’s most amazing web security platform, they found a way to deliver it at an impressively cost effective price point of less than $10 per month.

As Melih puts it, “Sometimes you have to innovate to achieve a price point rather than a feature. We achieved both a higher level of functionality and an affordable lower price with cWatch. Now everyone can have world-class protection for their websites.”

But what about the people who don’t yet have protection and are already suffering with infections and hacks?

Melih is a true believer in reciprocity and helping each other. That is why in his business models he always includes free offerings. He has never refused any charity asking for products for free and he has always made his products available to anyone who couldn’t otherwise afford it. He truly believes that “security is a right and not a luxury.”

As a result, all the website owners who are suffering and about to become shark bait for “website malware cleaning” providers charging hefty sums for services, now have a new champion. Melih has built the cWatch platform to be able to offer website malware cleaning, hack fixing and other services for FREE. 100% free. Because Melih believes that by serving site owners when they need security, he will gain their trust, and they will use his protection platform for the future.

Melih comes from the school of aligning the interests of security vendor with its customers. What that means is security companies should make money only when their customers are protected.

“There should simply be no incentive for a security company to profit from a customer’s security problems. If a customer is suffering, the security company who was supposed to be protecting them should suffer too. Security companies should not profit from their customer’s suffering. Rather, security companies should profit when they are effective at providing safety and protection to their clients,” said Melih.

So now you know the next challenge Melih is taking on, and his latest innovation will continue to protect us. It is a win-win for the digital platform industry, businesses and consumers, and takes Melih further along the road toward his goal of creating trust online.

Related Resources:

Melih Abdulhayoglu