“This Cyber Campus is the result of long work that we have carried out both with regional cybersecurity companies and with companies, communities and hospitals that have been or will be attacked. We will offer awareness, training, innovation and, above all, consistency since we aim to be the single point of contact, the gateway to the companies under attack”presents Andréa Brouille, vice-president of the regional council of Nouvelle-Aquitaine in responsible for economic development and, now, president of the brand new Regional Cyber Campus.
This new structure, which was created last spring in the form of an association, as part of the cybersecurity roadmap voted in 2020, is now entering a pre-operational phase. It is one of the regional versions of National Cyber Campus inaugurated in Paris La Défense on February 15 and which has already swarmed in particular in Hauts-de-Francein Brittany or in Franche-Comte.
“The campus model is collaboration”
Like its big brother in the Ile-de-France region, the Neo-Aquitaine Cyber Campus will have large premises to accommodate its small team of permanent staff (see box) but above all the many partner companies in the project, which is being built around a collaborative approach. “We will eventually have 20,000 m2 in Pessac Amperis, on the former Thales site. The campus model is collaboration between all public and private cybersecurity players”insists Guy Flament, the director of the Campus, which has brought together a hundred companies of all sizes present in the region, including Tehtris, which will set up its new headquarters in the same place, Serma Safety & Security, Atos, eShard, Orange Cyberdefense , Onepoint, Advens, Novenci, Ipssi, Game Partners, Knock Knock or even xSecu.
Seven permanent staff in 2023
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With a budget of 400,000 euros, provided entirely by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region, for the second half of 2022, the campus will be able to count on 700,000 euros in regional subsidies for a full year in 2023 before decreasing. In the long term, the annual budget is envisaged at around one million euros, shared in three equal parts between the regional council, the companies in the sector and the memberships. In terms of staff, there will be five full-time equivalents at the end of 2022 before climbing to seven in 2023. The ambition of the campus is also to operate strongly thanks to the time investment of the companies involved. The incident response center is supported by the State to the tune of one million euros over three years.
But the physical premises of Pessac, the first part of which will be delivered this fall, do not prevent the campus from seeking to mesh the regional territory. “We want to act in confidence and in close proximity with resource centers in Niort, Pau or Limoges to disseminate national and territorial strategies as close as possible to companies linked to Anssi, Cybermalveillance, internal security forces, ADI New Aquitaine and the Clusir [Club de sécurité de l’information en réseau]”says the director.
The single point of contact for regional victims
But, more concretely, the Cyber Campus aims to become the single point of contact for structures that are victims of a cyberattack, as detailed by Guy Flament:
“The idea is to be a regional computer incident response center to simplify the procedures for victims from the first hours of an attack with a chain, transparent for the victim, of escalations and de-escalations coordinated between all the actors The objective is to take charge of the responses to the incident, or even the reply, but also the preservation of the evidence, the filing of a complaint, the dialogue with the insurers and the auditors and the restarting of the system.”
And to also play the card of prevention and anticipation, the campus will distribute from September 2022 an alert service and operational tests on the latest critical vulnerabilities identified.
Training, the sinews of war
The other very big project of this new campus is obviously training in a context of skills shortage in the field of cybersecurity where between 10,000 and 15,000 positions remain vacant in France. The Cyber Campus will publish a catalog of all the certification courses available in the region and aims “to double at the start of the school year in September 2023 the number of people trained in the region”in particular by training trainers and supporting them.
“For companies, the quickest and cheapest is continuous training for professional retraining or professional development. Here again, we are going to speed up by identifying trainers and interested people and adapting training programs to their rhythms and places of work, in particular to reach small businesses”develops Guy Flament.
Finally, it will be necessary to succeed in attracting people to this training, in particular women who represent less than 10% of the current workforce in cybersecurity. A real communication challenge, according to the director: “We must remember that this is a profession where 80% of the work is not technical and where it is above all a question of governance and quality monitoring. It is also a profession that makes sense: protecting companies and administrations against an increasingly violent threat!”
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