Interview of our General Manager
Can you tell us about your profesionnal journey ?
I went to preparatory classes and joined Audencia Business School, from which I obtained a master’s degree with a specialization in auditing and management control in 2000.
At the end of my end-of-studies internship, I started my career with the audit and consulting firm KPMG in Luxembourg, in contact with many nationalities. At the time, I had the chance to work with clients in the banking and financial sector as well as in the industrial sector.
Subsequently, in 2004, I joined the American group Sara Lee in Paris, in a role of internal auditor which allowed me to travel the world in order to ensure the compliance of the subsidiaries with the standards and rules of the Group.
It was from 2008 that I carried out a formidable 13-year human adventure with the Belgian specialty chemist, Solvay. I held various internal audit, risk management and compliance positions there, with the last mission of being responsible of the Group’s Information Systems Security (CISO) and its cybersecurity program.
One of my main satisfactions during these years was to recruit and reveal the potential of young professionals, who subsequently took up positions of responsibility inside and outside the group and with whom I still enjoy discussing today.
Why did you take the gamble of setting up a business school dedicated to cybersecurity?
I discovered the world of cybersecurity on the job, without mastering the codes and without the technical background that is generally associated with it. However, I had the intuition that cyber risk would constitute a major risk, in the face of which organizations would have to structure themselves in order to better control it. If to apprehend this risk, technical expertise is necessary, the latter is not sufficient.
The human factor remains decisive in the success of organizations and therefore of a cybersecurity project. As a CISO, I was able to see the wide range of skills needed to improve an organization’s cybersecurity: legal, compliance, human resources, purchasing, communication, project management, finance… these are all areas interconnected with cybersecurity. .
More than a bet, the fact of launching a business school dedicated to cybersecurity is the result of a conviction: training is one of the key responses to the challenges of cybersecurity; and this training must approach it under all prisms, at the same time technical, human and organizational.
Everything about this school feels like a business, why is that important?
Cybersecurity is a subject whose concepts are evolving rapidly and which is complex to practice in real conditions. This is why it is essential to invest in creating the conditions for learning in partnership with the business world.
Although we are seeing progress in this area, there is still today a big gap between what we learn at school and what we actually use in business, and this is even truer in the field of cybersecurity.
Our goal is to fill this gap by creating a place that is intended as an extension of the professional world in which our learners will evolve sooner or later. And the sooner the better!
Your short and medium term ambitions for the school?
In the very short term, we are focused on opening our campus in Lyon in September 2022 in order to welcome our learners, our speakers, our partners and our team in the best conditions.
Tomorrow, the ambition is to expand in France and internationally and to support innovation and research to become part of the cybersecurity ecosystem in the long term.
Today, what inspires me, as well as the entire CSB team, is the challenge of creating an educational model that gives all types of talent a chance to flourish in a field of the future, and which helps cybersecurity actors to respond to the scarcity of resources.
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Cybersecurity Promotion Program
What is Cybermonth?
