Cyber-Security Clusters and Reindustrialisation

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 7, 2025

A rural county in Saxony-Anhalt shows why the next wave of advanced manufacturing will not start near a port but next to a SOC

Conventional reindustrialisation scripts open with a deep-water port, a gigafactory and a head-of-government in a hi-vis vest. Our version opens with a former Buna cooling tower wrapped in fibre and a 17-megawatt biogas engine that once kept synthetic-rubber lines alive and now keeps honeypots awake. The tower is not nostalgia; it is the gearbox. Cyber-security clusters turn post-industrial sites into pre-industrial ones: locations where factories are planned from the firewall inward, not from the shipping lane outward. The sequencing matters because the next tariff war will not be fought over containers but over data flows, and data flows need land more than they need berths. Anhalt-Bitterfeld has land, ash and memory in abundance; what it needed was a credible story that advanced manufacturing could start here again without ending here again. The story is now being written in Python and Rust, and the first chapter smells of solder rather than coal.

Start with the demand signal. The EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act earmarks €250 billion for battery, solar and hydrogen plants that must comply with NIS2 from day one. That compliance is not an IT footnote; it is a capital-expenditure line item that can add 8 % to the total project cost if the site is green-field and 14 % if the site is retrofitted. CFOs therefore hunt for locations where security infrastructure is already amortised, talent is already cleared, and the local CERT already answers the phone in STIX rather than Word. Anhalt-Bitterfeld delivers those three items as a bundled service: a shared SOC that is already certified to BSI GRUND 3, a vocational college that graduates 120 cleared technicians every year, and a county-wide dark-fibre ring that terminates inside the planned hydrogen cavern storage. The package is not marketed as “cheap land”; it is marketed as “de-risked security capex,” a phrase that flips the investment model from location-driven to compliance-driven. The first taker is a Scandinavian electrolyser maker that cancelled a Portuguese site after auditors priced the SOC build-out at €18 million; the same service here costs €3.2 million because the racks are already warm and the staff already exist.

The second gear is talent recycling. Reindustrialisation fails when regions import engineers instead of growing them. We reversed the flow by embedding a “factory-before-factory” programme inside the existing chemical-apprenticeship pipeline: second-year students spend six months wiring PLCs into our cyber-range, learning that a variable-frequency drive can be bricked by a Modbus packet as easily as by over-voltage. The range is physically located in Hall 14, the same hall where their grandfathers learned to vulcanise rubber, so the emotional arc is seamless—same overalls, same smell of glycol, same pride in keeping critical stuff alive. When the electrolyser plant breaks ground next spring, it will inherit a labour pool that already speaks both hydrogen and TLS 1.3, cutting the usual skills ramp-down from eighteen months to six. The plant’s HR director calls it “ hiring backwards”: instead of poaching finished engineers, he books apprentices who are still plastic and lets the cluster finish the moulding.

The third gear is capital recycling. Deindustrialised regions suffer from low collateral value; banks discount brown-field land at 50 % because remediation liability is opaque. Cyber infrastructure reverses that discount by turning liability into an asset that can be collateralised. The county’s development bank now accepts a certified SOC seat as collateral at 80 % of book value, the same haircut it gives to a new CNC machine, because the seat generates predictable cash-flow from membership fees. A 200-seat block therefore represents €1.6 million of borrowing base, enough to finance the asbestos removal of an adjacent hall without waiting for regional subsidies. The first beneficiary is a former acetylene plant whose soil contamination quote scared away every investor; the owner pledged 120 SOC seats, borrowed €960k, cleaned the site, and now hosts a fuel-cell stack assembly line that employs 180 people. The collateral is not imaginary; it is the monthly invoice stream from SMEs that pay to share the same threat feed.

"We did not bring factories back to the county; we brought the county forward until factories had no safer place to land."

The fourth gear is regulatory pre-certification. NIS2 obliges new industrial sites to demonstrate “appropriate and proportionate” cyber-security measures before the first tonne of feed-stock enters the pipe. Demonstrating that appropriateness normally takes twelve months of consultant reports; the cluster offers a pre-validated blueprint that has already survived a BSI audit. The blueprint includes network zoning maps, incident-response playbooks and supplier vetting procedures that map directly to the EU’s forthcoming Cyber-Resilience Act. Plant operators therefore inherit a compliance passport instead of a blank checklist, shaving six months off the commissioning timeline. For a €400 million electrolyser line, that acceleration is worth €18 million in foregone interest and penalty clauses, a saving that is written into the investment memo as “security capex negative.” The phrase is finance-speak for “the cyber infrastructure pays for itself before the first electron is split.”

The fifth and final gear is narrative legitimacy. Regions that have lost factories twice in one lifetime—first to off-shoring, then to automation—do not trust grand promises. They trust incremental proof. We therefore stage the reindustrialisation story as a relay race rather than a photo finish. Every quarter we publish a single metric that even the local newspaper can print without explanation: number of industrial jobs that now depend on a cyber service delivered inside the county. The first milestone was 42 jobs—the staff of the electrolyser plant’s security operations cell. The second was 73, when a battery separator firm booked SOC seats as part of its NIS2 compliance. By the time the counter reaches 500, the county will have replaced every job lost during the rubber collapse, but with salaries that are 30 % higher and skill sets that age at half the speed. The story is no longer “we will bring factories back”; it is “the factories are already back, and they clock in every morning inside the same firewall that protects the town hall.”

What emerges is a new industrial sequence: compliance first, capital second, concrete third. The old sequence—port, pipe, plant—assumed that physical logistics were the scarce resource. In the EU’s single market, logistics are abundant; trustworthy data flows are not. By front-loading cyber resilience, the county turns compliance from a drag factor into a magnet, attracting capital that would otherwise anchor near a port. The cooling tower that once vented excess steam now vents excess heat from GPU racks training intrusion-detection models; the symbolism is perfect—waste energy from digital defence becomes space heating for the next production line. Reindustrialisation, it turns out, is not about resurrecting smokestacks; it about repurposing the chimney as a heat exchanger for the cloud.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.