Economic Ripple Effects of a Rural Cyber-Security Cluster

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 10, 2025

A forensic walk-through of invoices, payrolls and late-night sandwich runs that prove resilience is cheaper than recession

Multiplier studies are usually where hope goes to die: consultants plug vague assumptions into input-output tables, announce that every million euros “supports” 2.3 jobs somewhere in the ether, and collect their fee. We did the opposite. We followed every invoice generated by the Cyber Resilience Alliance for four consecutive quarters, matched it to payroll slips, tax receipts and even the cash-register tapes of the 24-hour petrol station outside the SOC, and forced the numbers to confess what actually happened. The confession is 1.6: every euro that the Alliance spent inside the county boundary generated €1.60 of additional local income within the same fiscal year. The figure is conservative; it excludes second-order effects we could not trace, and it includes only transactions that left an auditable trail. What it does include is the kind of detail that finance ministers pretend to know but never do: the exact number of ham-and-cheese sandwiches that keep a night-shift analyst awake while she stares at a honeypot that is pretending to be a hydrogen valve.

The first ripple is the direct payroll wave. Alliance staff—120 engineers, 14 apprentices, 3 cleaners and 1 part-time barista—earned an average gross salary of €63 400 in 2025, 38 % above the county industrial average. The premium is financed by membership fees, not by subsidies, so the money arrives in the local economy without the leakage that usually accompanies grant-funded posts. Net-of-tax, those salaries became €48 700 per person, of which 72 % was spent inside the county boundary, tracked through the county’s voluntary consumer panel that links card transactions to postcodes. The spending pattern is surprisingly artisanal: 19 % goes to local groceries, 12 % to restaurants, 9 % to vehicle repair, 6 % to childcare. None of these categories shows up in traditional high-tech impact studies, yet together they account for more disposable income than the software-licence line item that dominates the Alliance’s budget. The payroll wave alone explains €6.8 million of additional local turnover, a figure that can be verified by matching VAT returns of 312 local businesses between Q1 and Q4. The butcher on Sanderslebener Strasse registered a 14 % increase in weekday sales after the night shift switched from frozen pizza to fresh schnitzel, a delta that disappears when we exclude Alliance payroll weeks. That is not anecdote; it is a matched time-series.

The second ripple is the vendor-replacement effect. Before the Alliance, local SMEs bought cyber-security services from out-of-county providers—mostly Hanover and Berlin—at an average contract value of €18 400 per year. Those invoices left the county and never returned. After the Alliance launched its federated service catalogue, 87 % of the same SMEs switched to the county-based SOC, paying on average €12 600 for an equivalent package. The price drop is the result of shared infrastructure, but the critical metric is retention: 78 cents of every euro now stays inside the county, either as Alliance payroll, local supplier payment, or municipal business tax. Over four quarters, the switch redirected €1.9 million that would have leaked to Berlin into local cash registers. The leakage that remains—22 cents—covers software licences that are still bought from global vendors, but even that fraction is captured indirectly because the Alliance negotiates enterprise licences and resells them at cost, booking the margin as local revenue. The county’s own VAT intake rose by €142 000, a figure that matches the forecast line item in the budget submitted to the finance ministry. For the first time in twenty years, the ministry did not ask for a revision.

The third ripple is the real-estate repricing effect. Commercial rents in the Buna park had flat-lined at €2.10 per square metre, barely enough to cover property tax and asbestos insurance. After the Alliance announced it would occupy 4 200 m² of Hall 14, adjacent rents rose to €3.60 within six months, not because speculators arrived but because existing owners finally had a credible reason to refurbish. The refurbishment itself generated €2.3 million of construction invoices, all awarded to local trades: electricians who had last wired a PLC in 1993 now pulled CAT6A cable, roofers who once kept out chemical rain now install solar panels that feed the immersion-cooling tanks. The construction surge is traceable through building-permit fees, which rose 34 % year-on-year, and through social-security contributions of construction workers, which rose 28 % in the same period. None of those workers appear on the Alliance payroll, yet their wages would not exist without the occupancy signal that the Alliance sent. The repricing effect is conservative because we only counted contracts that mention the Alliance as lessee; we ignored speculative builds that cite “cyber potential” in their permit applications, so the true ripple is larger but undocumented.

"We counted every sandwich, every shift, every splice box—and the total still surprised us: resilience pays rent."

The fourth ripple is the apprenticeship accelerator. The Alliance committed to 14 new cyber-mechanic apprentices per year, each paid 85 % of the local industrial wage. The county’s vocational school had to hire two additional instructors, creating €186 000 of new payroll that is financed by the Alliance but appears on the school’s books. The instructors spend 60 % of their time training apprentices who will never work for the Alliance; instead, they join local SMEs that now qualify for NIS2 compliance. The multiplier here is temporal: every apprentice who stays in the county after graduation adds €38 500 of annual payroll that was not in the baseline. Over a ten-year horizon, the present value of that wage stream is €2.7 million, discounted at the county’s cost of capital. The figure is auditable because the school tracks graduate destination through social-security numbers; 78 % of the 2025 cohort remained inside the county six months after graduation. That retention rate is 22 points above the state average for IT graduates, proof that the apprenticeship accelerator is not a pipeline out of the region but a pipeline into it.

The fifth ripple is the late-night economy, the most elusive but the most honest. The SOC runs three shifts, the last ending at 2 a.m. Analysts buy sandwiches, petrol, and occasionally a new tyre after driving over debris on the unlit industrial road. We collected card-payment data from the only 24-hour petrol station within a five-kilometre radius and compared Tuesday-through-Thursday sales before and after the night shift began. Average nightly revenue rose from €147 to €312, an increase that correlates 0.94 with the number of analysts on duty. Over a year, the petrol station registers an extra €60 000 of revenue that would not exist without the night shift. The owner, a third-generation family business, used the predictable cash flow to hire a second cashier, creating one additional part-time job that shows up in no high-tech impact study yet matters to a village that had not seen a new vacancy since 2004. The ripple is tiny, but it is the kind of tiny that keeps a village alive long enough to benefit from the larger waves that follow.

Add the five ripples together—payroll, vendor replacement, real estate, apprentices, night-shift sandwiches—and the county’s gross domestic product rose by €9.7 million in four quarters, traceable to €6.1 million of Alliance direct spend. The ratio is 1.6, a multiplier that is lower than the headline numbers you read in airport brochures, but it is real, audited, and reproducible. The county finance office has already embedded the ratio into the 2026 budget forecast, treating cyber resilience not as a cost centre but as a revenue engine whose yield is higher than the regional transport subsidy and less leaky than the industrial aid that came before it. When the next recession arrives—and it will—the county will not ask whether it can afford a SOC; it will ask how many more sandwiches the night shift can sell.

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.