Firefly AI says it can make apps almost invulnerable to cloud outages – News

Cloud infrastructure-as-code startup Firefly AI is turning its attention to cyberattack recovery with a new Cloud Resilience Posture Management offering.

Starting today, it says it can help enterprises recover from major cyberattacks and cloud outages in minutes, simply by teleporting their entire application environments onto fresh infrastructure that’s ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

The launch of Firefly’s CRPM is especially timely, as it comes in the wake of a trio of major cloud outages that recently hit the headlines. Last month, both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure experienced major disruptions that took hundreds of well known applications and services offline globally.

In the case of AWS, the outage at its North Virginia data center cluster took out services such as Open AI Group PBC’s ChatGPT, Disney+, Snapchat, Venmo and Perplexity AI. Azure’s hiccups just over a week later caused similar problems for companies that included Starbucks Corp., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Capital One Financial Corp. Then last week there was a third major outage involving Cloudflare Inc., which caused yet more disruption for ChatGPT and also Sora, which is OpenAI’s video generation tool.

These incidents highlight a major challenge for enterprises. Though almost every business backs up its data as a matter of course, they don’t always do the same for their infrastructure. What this means is that, while they can restore access to their data in minutes, they cannot easily rebuild the infrastructure they need to bring disrupted applications back to life.

That’s why it often takes several hours for services to be restored following an outage. Companies have no recourse but to wait for the cloud provider to get its act together.

Firefly AI says it can put an end to these hours-long delays in getting apps back up and running. It says its new offering enables “disaster recovery-as-code.” It employs a new “disaster recovery agent” to capture all of the infrastructure configurations and dependencies each app and services relies on. In effect, it makes cloud infrastructure portable, so it can automatically be redeployed elsewhere in the event of a new outage.

What this means is that if an organization’s most critical apps are hosted in Amazon’s North Virginia data centers and that site suffers another outage, it can rapidly rebuild those apps in an alternative region that’s unaffected. Its DR Agent takes regular point-in-time snapshots of each app, and promises to bring them back online in a matter of minutes, with barely any disruption for end users.

Firefly AI also provides tools that allow businesses to assess the “recovery readiness” of each application and service, and also helps identify where resiliency is threatened, such as when a service is reliant on a single cloud region. It says it will continuously scan customers’ cloud environments and automatically generate refreshed infrastructure-as-code files for each deployment, so they’re always ready to rebound in the event that another outage strikes.

During the AWS outage, Firefly said one of its customers – an unnamed financial services institution – was able to get its core apps back online within just 17 minutes. Meanwhile, the likes of OpenAI, Snapchat Inc. and Walt Disney Co. had to wait hours before they were able to recover fully.

Firefly co-founder and Chief Executive Ido Neeman said enterprises need to be ready, because it’s never a question of “if” but “when” the next outage will occur. “[They] occur all the time, and while not all of them are newsworthy, each incident costs companies millions in lost revenue, productivity and customer trust,” he said. “We are redefining what it means to be cloud-ready,” giving enterprises the ability to recover their applications within minutes instead of waiting for the cloud provider to fix things.

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