It’s official: the long-awaited Campus Cyber opened its doors this Tuesday, February 15, 2022, in the presence of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. This totem place for cybersecurity in France is located in Puteaux, in the Bellini district, in the heart of La Défense. Its role will be to gather industrialists, start-ups, State services, associations and research actors around cybersecurity.
The Cyber Campus: new place-totem for cybersecurity
In February 2021, Emmanuel Macron presented a one billion euro plan to boost the cybersecurity sector in France. At the time, the President of the Republic wanted to mark the occasion following the ransomware attacks on two French hospitals. It was on this occasion that the Campus Cyber project was actually publicized. Prior to this, in July 2019, the Prime Minister at the time Edouard Philippe, had mandated Michel Van Den Berghe, current President of the Cyber Campus and former CEO of Orange Cyberdefense, to “examine the opportunity and feasibility of this project”.
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A year ago, the President of the Republic said he wanted “strengthen the links and synergies between cybersecurity players in order to structure it through the creation of a Cyber Campus”. With the acceleration of the use of digital in all sectors, cyber attacks are on the rise and this plan must precisely enable the State to strengthen its capacity to anticipate them rather than to combat them. The Cyber Campus must precisely fit into this strategy and even be a central element.
A project led by Emmanuel Macron
Composed of 26,000 square meters, the Cyber Campus will host a series of actions aimed at uniting the cybersecurity community and creating synergy between the various players. This new space so desired by Emmanuel Macron is based on four main pillars: operations, innovation, training and mobilization. The Cyber Campus will also offer events “conducive to exchanges and the discovery of developments in the digital society”. Members of the campus team will be responsible to organize conferencesto record podcasts, round tables, job dating events, or even experiments in real conditions.
The moment is particularly well chosen for Emmanuel Macron and for France more generally, which currently occupies the role of “President of the Council of the European Union for 6 months”. The government benefits from this role to highlight issues related to cybersecurity. This is particularly the case with the revision of the directive “Network and information security” (NIS), which governs the security of operators of essential services. A few days ago, France organized a conference entitled “Building Europe’s digital sovereignty”during which Cédric O proposed to create around fifteen European funds endowed with at least 1 billion euros to finance start-ups.