On October 20, 2025, AWS US-East-1 went down. Thousands of companies, from global banks to SaaS platforms, experienced hours of downtime. Even organizations with “best-in-class” Backup & Disaster Recovery tools found themselves helpless. They had their data safely backed up, yet their applications were offline. A week later Azure and Office365 went down. In November CloudFlare experienced a massive outage that impacted the uptime of hundreds of critical services.

Those events (and many other that don’t get front-page news coverage) expose a reality many chose to deny; backup without infrastructure recovery is not truly resilient and does not enable business continuity.

Teams monitor cost, security, and compliance, but almost no one monitors what actually determines survival: resilience. When a region fails or a cyberattack hits, most SaaS services discover they can’t meet the SLAs and RTOs they proudly advertise - because their cloud environment simply isn’t built to recover when the underlying infrastructure collapses.

Enter Cloud Resilience Posture Management (CRPM).

What Is CRPM?

Cloud Resilience Posture Management is a continuous process that monitors and improves a cloud environment’s ability to withstand failures and cyber threats.
It blends best practices from Disaster Recovery, CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and Cloud Automation to ensure cloud applications can endure disruptions and recover automatically.

The goal: to both proactively and reactively assess and strengthen resilience through automated discovery, validation, and remediation. A strong CRPM continuously scans your environment to answer questions every CIO, Platform Owner, and SRE should be able to answer instantly:

  • Which cloud assets are backed up, and which aren’t?
  • Can the infrastructure that powers cloud applications automatically be recovered into another region or account?
  • Are backups aligned with enterprise policy and recovery objectives?
  • What’s the applications’ dependency on specific regions, services, or accounts?
  • Are there configuration drifts that risk secondary or recovery sites?
  • Is there a full change log for the cloud infrastructure to share with auditors post-incident?

Why CRPM Matters, Especially Now

The October 2025 AWS outages were not isolated events; it was a wake-up call. Cloud complexity and regional dependency have reached a point where resilience can no longer be assumed. Even organizations running multi-cloud strategies discovered that redundancy on paper didn’t translate to continuity in practice. The “AI Race” that all large cloud providers compete in, affects the prioritization of speed over reliability, and cloud users must ensure the resilience of their services with a dedicated set of tools.

Gartner’s new CAIRS (Cloud Application Infrastructure Recovery Solutions) category was born from this realization: that enterprises need automation to rebuild their infrastructure, not just restore their data.
But the common problem when trying to execute? Automation without visibility is blind. That’s where CRPM steps in: continuously evaluating your environment’s ability to recover, enforcing backup standards, and orchestrating remediation when gaps appear.

The Core Pillars of CRPM

A complete Cloud Resilience Posture Management framework includes six key capabilities:

1. Unified Cloud Inventory

Real-time mapping of all resources, dependencies, and configurations across clouds, accounts, and regions: covering compute, networking, databases, IAM policies, Kubernetes, and essential external services such as CDNs, identity providers, observability tools, and external databases.

2. Continuous Backup of Configurations and Data Stores

Automated capture of infrastructure definitions and data backup states to ensure every critical component is restorable.

3. Resilience Visibility Dashboard

Clear visualization of which resources comply with backup and DR policies - and which remain exposed - turning resilience from a guess into a measurable, actionable metric.

4. Automated Policy Enforcement & Remediation

When deviations occur (for example, an unprotected S3 bucket or un-replicated RDS instance), CRPM automatically triggers corrective workflows or alerts the right team to maintain compliance.

5. Drift Detection & Backup Freshness Monitoring

Continuous validation that backups are current and infrastructure definitions haven’t drifted from production reality.

6. Shift-Left Resilience in CI/CD

Integration into pipelines to block non-compliant deployments before they reach production: ensuring resilience is built-in, not bolted-on. Resilience must be proactive, and not reactive.

Firefly’s Approach: From Discovery to Recovery

At Firefly AI, we believe CRPM is not a standalone tool. It’s a capability that should be embedded in every stage of your Cloud Automation journey.

As your Cloud System-of-Record, Firefly continuously discovers and maps every cloud asset, dependency, and configuration across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. It automatically generates Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for your live environments, creating an always-up-to-date blueprint that can be redeployed in another account or region within minutes.

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Firefly extends CRPM with:

  • Automated IaC generation: so your environment is always reproducible.
  • Backup and DR visibility: a live view of which resources are protected and which are exposed.
  • Resilience analytics: a real-time score for your Cloud Resilience Posture.
  • Drift and policy remediation: continuous correction to keep configurations and backups aligned.
  • Disaster Recovery-as-Code (CAIRS): automatic redeployment of infrastructure during an outage.
  • Shift-Left Cloud Resilience: Ensure every deployment to the cloud meets your reliability and DR policies.

Firefly turns CRPM from an audit exercise into an operational safety net: one that ensures every deployment, configuration change, and backup contributes to true business continuity.

Evolving From Backup to Business Continuity

The future of cloud reliability is proactive, not reactive, and CRPM enables teams to move beyond post-incident recovery to continuous resilience: where every environment is audit-ready, backup-verified, and instantly recoverable.

In a world where digital downtime can cost millions per hour, resilience is not optional, and it’s finally measurable. Firefly AI is the way enterprises measure and achieve it.

Your next step? See Firefly at work or explore our CRPM capabilities.

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