Two weeks ago, when a cybersecurity software update shut down millions of Microsoft Windows devices globally, the world woke up to a scenario that science fiction writers and policy experts have warned of for decades. In the hours and days that followed, large and small companies and institutions worked to resolve the issues in their IT estates; some didn't know where to start. As we look forward, many are asking what can we learn? What do we change?

At Kyndryl, our teams immediately mobilized to help our customers recover their IT systems and lessen disruption. Thanks to our AI-powered IT infrastructure insights platform - Kyndryl Bridge - our experts immediately identified the impacted systems that support our customers' business operations. They turned this visibility into insights to prioritize and apply fixes for our customers, efficiently restoring our customers' operations.

Cyber events can take many forms. Some are caused by bad actors maliciously breaking things, but some can be caused by a bad patch, human error, siloed ways of working, ineffective vendor management and more. This outage highlights the critical importance of being cyber resilient, which means implementing systems and processes that help proactively protect against any cyber event, from a sophisticated cyberattack to issues encountered during software updates.

Based on interviews with top Kyndryl experts, here are five actions businesses can take now to reduce the risk of being a victim of a cyber event, reduce the scale of impact and speed time to recovery if they are impacted despite preparedness.