Ambidextrous Cybersecurity: The Seven Pillars (7Ps) of Cyber Resilience

Organizational ambidexterity balances exploitative and exploratory behaviors so that organizations are able to exploit their existing competencies while simultaneously exploring new opportunities. Similarly, ambidextrous cybersecurity (AMBI-CYBER) focuses on the protection of data, systems, and networks, while fostering the rapid introduction of new technologies within a company. This balance is linked to cybersecurity absorptive capacity and defines the "Cybersecurity Efficient Frontier." In this paper, we view AMBI-CYBER as a combination of organizational as well as technological and cultural competences which rely upon a multifaceted, multimodal, multinodal, and multilevel set of skills and capabilities. We outline the anatomy of the AMBI-CYBER architecture adopting a balanced scorecard, multistage approach under a 7Ps stage gate model (Patient, Persistent, Persevering, Proactive, Predictive, Preventive, and Preemptive). Such an approach emphasizes the need to enable a complex, nonlinear, adaptive process of dynamic intangible organizational assets, resources, and capabilities across a performance frontier where we aim to optimize safety, security, and privacy effectiveness and efficiency. We also suggests that the Quadruple/Quintuple Helix Innovation model may promote AMBI-CYBER enabling a locus-centric and triple-bottom-line-centric entrepreneurial process of discovery followed by development, exploration, exploitation, and deployment.