Report · 2020
Campus Cyber : fédérer et faire rayonner l'écosystème de la cybersécurité
[Campus Cyber: uniting and promoting the cybersecurity ecosystem — pre-figuration report to the Prime Minister, January 2020]
Pre-figuration report submitted to the Prime Minister on 7 January 2020, at the end of a mission assigned in July 2019 and nearly sixty hearings, proposing the operating model for the future Campus Cyber.
This is the founding document, to be read alongside my 2026 retrospective note. It is the only pair in this library where a plan and its outcome can be set side by side, and I am a co-author of both, which needs to be said upfront: no one is well placed to evaluate a plan they wrote themselves.
The report was submitted on 7 January 2020, following a mission assigned in July 2019 and nearly sixty hearings, then made public at the Forum International de la Cybersécurité (the International Cybersecurity Forum) in Lille by Cédric O and Michel Van Den Berghe.
Three gaps between the plan and its realisation, measurable and instructive.
Floor space. The report proposed a site of 10,000 to 15,000 m². The Campus occupies 26,000, double the upper bound. A public project whose physical ambition doubles between the feasibility study and delivery is rare enough to be worth noting, and the question is not whether the outcome was better, but what it says about how the feasibility study had gauged demand.
The timeline. The opening was planned for the first half of 2021; it took place in February 2022. A year’s delay on a building project that lived through a pandemic is not a failure, but the study had built in no margin at all, which is an ordinary weakness of this kind of exercise.
The territorial map. The report envisaged satellite sites in Hauts-de-France, Pays de la Loire and Brittany. Five regional campuses have since been officially recognised: Hauts-de-France, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Normandie, Brittany, Région Sud. Two of the three regions we anticipated are on that list, Pays de la Loire is not, and three unplanned regions were added. The actual network was built by the initiative of the territories rather than by the map we had drawn. That is probably the document’s best lesson: an ecosystem scheme cannot be planned from Paris; it has to be allowed to declare itself.
One reversal, to close. The report studied Beer Sheva in Israel, Cyber NYC, LORCA in London and Chengdu as models to learn from. Six years later, Lithuania has opened its own campus on the French model, and Germany and the Netherlands are both taking an interest. We were the ones comparing; we have become the one compared.