In the newly released Hype Cycle for Backup and Data Protection Technologies, 2025, Gartner included Firefly: recognized for our Cloud Application Infrastructure Recovery capabilities. 

That means that in addition to being named a 2024 Gartner Cool Vendor for Platform Engineering, and being featured in this year’s Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation and Orchestration Tools, this achievement marks our fifth Gartner Hype Cycle recognition in the last year, following:

But what does this tell us, exactly?

When it comes to cloud backup and data protection, the message is clear: traditional backup approaches are failing enterprises, and comprehensive infrastructure automation is the answer. Firefly’s continued recognition, time and time again, validates a major shift in how the industry thinks about cloud protection. 

Pioneering a New Category: Cloud Application Infrastructure Recovery

Firefly's inclusion in Gartner's latest Hype Cycle for Backup and Data Protection Technologies, 2025 underscores what industry leaders already know: enterprise cloud backup requires a fundamentally different approach. But this recognition is particularly significant. 

Gartner didn't just acknowledge another backup vendor. They created an entirely new category: Cloud Application Infrastructure Recovery (CAIRS). And Firefly is one of only three companies they named.

Think about that. We're recognized alongside companies that have spent decades and billions building traditional backup empires — and Gartner is acknowledging that our approach represents the future of the industry.

The Multi-Million Dollar Recovery Gamble Legacy Players Don't Want to Admit

C-suite executives are unknowingly betting their companies on recovery strategies that haven't evolved past the data center era. While digital transformation initiatives pump millions into cloud migrations, backup strategies are stuck in 2015. 

The result? Organizations with billion-dollar cloud footprints, protected by tools designed for static servers.

It’s time to expose the fundamental flaw in traditional enterprise cloud backup: modern applications depend on complex configurations across multiple cloud services, auto-scaling groups, managed databases, and interconnected APIs. Legacy backup solutions capture data, but miss the architectural DNA that makes applications actually function.

The financial implications are staggering. When recovery fails, organizations don't just lose data. They lose entire business capabilities. Revenue streams halt. Customer trust evaporates. Competitive advantages disappear. All because the backup strategy was built for a world that no longer exists.

Why Infrastructure-as-Code Eliminates the Need for Traditional Backup

Here’s the breakthrough insight: when infrastructure is properly codified, recovery becomes deployment. When configurations exist as version-controlled code, restoration becomes automation. When dependencies are explicitly defined in code, rebuilding becomes reproducible.

What Gartner calls CAIRS solutions don’t just work better than traditional backup; they’re fundamentally more reliable. Code can be tested. Infrastructure can be validated. Dependencies can be verified. 

Organizations using this approach will see recovery times measured in minutes, not hours. They’ll achieve 100% infrastructure reproducibility. And as an added bonus, they eliminate the anxiety that comes with untested backup procedures and cross-your-fingers recovery strategies.

What Legacy Cloud Backup Vendors Still Can't Solve: Drift

Gartner's latest Hype Cycle for Backup and Data Protection Technologies identified a core issue that legacy solutions can't address: “cloud configuration drift — due to the ease of adding or scaling applications to the cloud — results in complexity and the inability to restore to a well-known state."

This is exactly the problem IaC solves elegantly. 

While legacy vendors try to snapshot ever-changing cloud configurations, comprehensive automation ensures infrastructure remains in a known, reproducible state. While traditional approaches hope backups have captured everything correctly, IaC guarantees it. That’s all possible with Firefly.

Fifth Hype Cycle Recognition, Clear Market Direction

Firefly’s ongoing Hype Cycle recognition pattern signals a broader market shift. The era of specialized tools for individual problems is ending, and the future belongs to unified platforms that address the interconnected challenges of modern cloud operations holistically.

Organizations that adopt comprehensive infrastructure automation now will establish operational advantages that become increasingly difficult for competitors to match. On the other hand, those who continue investing in traditional enterprise cloud backup solutions will find themselves, more and more often, disadvantaged by operational complexity and reliability challenges that automation platforms solve easily.

The transformation is already happening, and legacy vendors are desperately acquiring companies to catch up. Tomorrow’s solution for a resilient, secure, immutable cloud is comprehensive infrastructure automation, not traditional backup. And with Firefly, that solution is here today.

Dive deeper into Firefly's disaster recovery capabilities.

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