Public-Private Partnership: The Missing Factor in the Resilience Equation. The French Experience on CIIP

For many years, information security has been the exclusive domain of a closed community of people from military, academics and IT companies. The information revolution in the 90s radically changed the scale and the nature of the issue. With the massive penetration of digital information and communication technology (ICT) in all advanced economies, people and engineered machines are now part of the same global environment made of information: the infosphere. Moreover, due to the deregulation process of many public sectors in the 80s and the globalization of 90s, the private sector now owns the majority of critical infrastructures, including information networks, and is at the core of the ICT expertise. Therefore, this revolution brings the problem of Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) beyond traditional national defense circles and the terms of the political debate around CIIP are now focusing on a main point: the cooperation between public authorities and the private sector is needed to enhance resilience, but its implementation is hard to achieve. A Schizophrenic State No Longer at the Centre of the Security Realm