As part of the eighth edition of the Hexatrust professional association’s Summer University, on September 6, the Minister Delegate for Digital Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, unveiled his roadmap for cybersecurity. In his speech, he highlighted the various projects that will be launched in the field as well as his ambitions for the next three years.
Jean-Noël Barrot’s ambitions for the cybersecurity sector
It is in front of an audience made up of several players from the industrial world, including the president of Campus Cyber, Michel Van Den Berghe, and the president of the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (Anssi), Guillaume Poupard that Jean -Noël Barrot began his speech by presenting his new ambitions for 2025. He thus targeted three priority objectives:
- Multiply by three the turnover of the cybersecurity sector in France. According Statesman, this result is $5.1 billion in 2022 and should, if growth remains the same, reach $7 billion in 2025, an increase of 40%. A result far from the ambitions of the Minister Delegate for Digital.
- Three additional unicorns should see the light of day bringing the total number of unicorns to 30, against 27 today in France. The latest unicorn is EcoVadis, having raised $500 million last June. It offers a popular platform for assessing corporate social responsibility performance.
- 37,000 additional jobs are expected to be created in the cybersecurity sector.
Several topics were raised by Jean-Noël Barrot during the presentation of his roadmap. Each action that will be implemented by the end of the year must serve to achieve these three objectives by 2025.
Accelerate the development of start-ups specializing in cybersecurity
The minister mentioned in his speech the future creation of an accelerator for cybersecurity start-ups. By helping start-ups in the sector, the government hopes that they can help companies to strengthen themselves at this level, while attacks against public and private establishments continue to grow. At the end of August, the CH Sud Francilien located in Corbeil-Essonnes, in the Paris region, was the victim of a ransomware.
Jean-Noël Barrot confirmed that he had allocated an additional 20 million euros to Anssi, after this attack, to strengthen support for health establishments in terms of cybersecurity. This new funding is in addition to the national plan for cybersecurity billion euros presented by his predecessor Cédric O and Emmanuel Macron in February 2021.
Several announcements expected mid-September 2022
In order to support SMEs and ETIs, a plan should also be presented in the coming days. Recently, the question of cyberassurances has returned to the fore: while in May 2021, there was no question of compensating victims of ransomware, the Ministry of Economy and Finance proposes to include this possibility of being compensated in a regulatory framework . The victims will then have to file a complaint to benefit from reparations.
Announcements will also be made around cloud computing according to Jean-Noël Barrot. They should relate to the future European certification scheme. This new legislation would include strong requirements for digital sovereignty. The EU has wanted to be independent of foreign providers in this sector for several years now and has even launched its sovereign cloud project, the project GAIA-X who knew some difficulties.