Rennes (AFP)

With 3,400 direct jobs, 70 private companies and the headquarters of the military command of cyber defense (Comcyber), the Rennes metropolis has become a Mecca of cybersecurity in France, a situation inherited from Gaullism, in a sector in full development.

At the end of the 1960s, the government wanted to establish the Armament Electronics Center (Celar) in the provinces. "Two cities were in balance, Rennes / Bruz and Grenoble, Rennes apparently winning at the last minute", in an area where had been established the National Center for Telecommunications Studies (Cnet) in Lannion, explains Pierre-Arnaud Borrelly, delegate-general of the Pole of Excellence cyber (PEC).

This structure initiated in 2014 by the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Regional Council of Brittany associates civil and military actors, public and private, academic and industrial, to develop the sector (formation, research, economic radiance).

Through Celar, which became in 2009 DGA-MI (Directorate-General for Armaments, Master of Information), the army has continued to develop its cyber activities in the Breton capital, as the subject was taking of magnitude in the 2010s.

And in October, the military command of the cyber defense inaugurated in Rennes the first building entirely dedicated to the conduct of its operations in cyberspace. "By 2025, we will have an army of 4,000 cyber-fighters, 1,000 more than today.On this thousand recruitments, 800 will be operated in the Rennes basin," said the Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly.

In the stands of "The European cyber week" organized this month, many players in the sector felt that Rennes becomes cyber what Toulouse is for aeronautics, in a Breton metropolis that invented the Minitel (1980) and where the army established in 2005 the museum of transmissions.

The inauguration of the Comcyber "shows a little more than it is where it is now," notes Frederic Julhes, director of Airbus Cybersecurity France, pointing out that the aerospace giant "had already planted the flag" to Rennes in June with the opening of a center of excellence.

- Snowball effect" -

Another heavyweight in the industry, Thales, also wove its web in the West, with the inauguration this month of a new site specializing in cyber defense, named "La Ruche", with projects in particular in the field of aviation cybersecurity. "Brittany has been a land of innovation in the field of digital technologies for a very long time," says Pierre Jeanne, Vice President of Cyber ​​Security Technologies and Solutions.

"As soon as you make a product, a solution, a system, it will be tested by the teams in Bruz within the DGA-MI, it's really the heart that has attracted the rest," he says, also pointing the role played by Breton Jean-Yves Le Drian, former Minister of Defense, in the creation of the CEP.

In a constantly changing field, the focus is also on the training of tomorrow's "cyber-fighters", while computer attacks are making headlines, such as the one that hit Rouen University Hospital in mid-November. "A global study shows that by 2022, there will be two million cyber security experts missing, because there are more and more digital offerings, but experts are not trained quickly enough to protect them," says M Julhes.

It is thus 90 PhD students who carry out a thesis related to this subject while more than one hundred students are in masters in specialized training in cybersecurity. And in September 2020, a "CyberSchool" will offer students an interdisciplinary program "in the fundamental and emerging areas of cybersecurity" with the objective "to reach a staff of 580 students".

Jean-Marc Jézéquel, head of Irisa, one of the largest French research laboratories in computing, evokes him "a snowball effect".

Professionals in the sector "need well-trained staff, engineers and researchers, and seeing this ecosystem very rich, companies, including a flurry of start-ups, come to settle," he says, noting also that " ANSSI (National Agency for Security of Information Systems) has decided to relocate part of its activities by putting 250 people by 2025 on the Rennes basin ".

© 2019 AFP