Paris (AFP)

The future French cybersecurity campus bringing together companies, universities and public organizations could begin to function as soon as "the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021," said Thursday Michel VanDenBerghe, the boss of Orange CyberDefense commissioned by the Prime Minister to make proposals on the subject.

Mr. VanDenBerghe will give mid-December to the Prime Minister his report on the contours of this future site "from 8 to 10.000 square meters", able to accommodate at first "7 or 800 people," he said Thursday in front of an audience of patrons and French specialists of the sector.

The President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron and the government want to make emerge in France a cybercampus comparable to the Israeli Cyberspark, a place of work and meeting able to bring out startups and products of world level by mixing researchers, students, cells of cybersecurity of large companies, startups or investment funds

VanDenberghe will recommend that the future campus - to be located in existing buildings instead - be located in Paris or the inner suburbs, a place of unmatched concentration of cybersecurity specialists, he explained.

"When an ecosystem is created, you have to avoid moving it," he said. "The companies told me + our experts are positioned in Paris and in the very near Paris region and it will be very difficult for us to expatriate them a little too far from Paris +", he added.

But the future cybercampus may have "satellites" spread throughout the Hexagon, he explained.

Rennes, which hosts French cybermilitaries, could host a defense-oriented site, while the Pays-de-la-Loire and Lyon / Grenoble could constitute targeted establishments for connected objects for the first, and the security of industrial systems for the latter.

"This cybercampus, it will be a bit like the village of Asterix 4.0," said Guillaume Poupard, the director general of Anssi, the guardian of French computer security. "We will have" in one place "all these actors (...) are small but still resist the invader", the digital giants American and Chinese, he said.

France "has a boulevard in front of it" to emerge a leading cyber security industry in Europe, he said.

The cybercampus will mainly be financed by companies and organizations that will be present, said Michel VanDenBerghe. "Everyone will pay his square meters".

Among the organizations that have agreed to set up teams on campus are large companies such as Thales, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, BNP-Paribas, startups like Alsid and schools like Epita.

© 2019 AFP