Every disaster recovery plan rests on an unstated assumption that whoever runs it can still authenticate even during downtime. 

When the identity layer itself is compromised or unavailable, that assumption fails, and you can't get back online until it's restored. Firefly keeps your identity stack recoverable and restores it to a clean, known-good state, whether you run Okta or Microsoft Entra ID.

What identity resilience really means

Most resilience strategies share the same blind spot. 

Teams diligently back up their data and assume they're covered, but a modern application isn't a database. It's an ecosystem of interconnected cloud services and third-party tools: networking, IAM roles, load balancers, your CDN, your observability stack, your identity provider. A data backup protects almost none of it. When an outage or cyberattack strikes, the data survives while the configuration layer that makes it usable is gone, and you're left holding data with nothing to run it on. 

That's the concept Firefly is putting into the market: data backup ≠ business continuity. 

Real resilience isn't about backups; it's about bringing your applications back quickly, rebuilding the infrastructure itself, not just restoring the data. That's what Firefly does: continuously capturing your cloud estate as Infrastructure-as-Code and rebuilding it on demand into a clean region or account.

Your identity provider is one of those dependencies, and the most consequential, because it's the control plane that decides who can reach every other resource. Identity resilience is simply cloud resilience applied to that layer: making your identity configuration itself recoverable. (That means continuously captured, versioned, governed, and rebuildable to a known-good state. Not user records sitting in a backup, but the full working behavior of your identity layer: the SSO policies, MFA rules, group memberships, role assignments, conditional access, and app integrations that make identity actually do something.)

Restoring that partially is the same as not restoring it at all. If you miss one access policy or one group mapping, access breaks in ways nobody can trace under pressure. That's because identity isn't a static list of users. It's a living web of relationships: who inherits what, which group grants which privilege, how one policy depends on another, and it changes every day. The hardest part to recover isn't the objects; it's the structure they live in. 

For a hybrid Entra ID environment, that structure reaches down into the Active Directory forest it syncs from: the domains, schema, trust relationships, and the group and role hierarchy that give every access decision its meaning. For Okta, it's the org-level backbone: authorization servers, policies, and group rules that sit above individual users. Restore the accounts but lose the forest, the org structure, or the relationships between them, and you've recovered names without the framework that makes them work.

Why identity recoverability is the one you can't skip

Because identity is the control plane, everything else depends on it coming back first. Attackers know it, and because of it, they increasingly log in rather than break in: using valid credentials to move quietly, escalate privilege, and plant backdoors. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 reported that nearly 90% of its 2026 incident-response investigations traced back to identity compromise.

When identity goes down (whether it's targeted directly or wiped along with everything else in a cyber incident, a regional outage, or a runaway automation),  the blast radius isn't one system. Everyone is locked out at once, including the responders who are supposed to fix it. Every downstream recovery is gated on getting identity back first. Identity recoverability isn't one line item among many; it's the prerequisite for all the others. Recover your cloud without recovering identity and you've rebuilt a building that no one can unlock.

The recovery gap most teams aren’t planning for

There's a comfortable assumption that because Okta and Entra ID are SaaS, the vendor will hand your configuration back if ransomware, a bad change, or a hostile takeover corrupts it. It won't. Both run a shared-responsibility model: they keep the service online, but the state of your tenant, including every policy, group, and assignment in it, is yours to protect and yours to restore.

Native tooling gives you logs, exports, and maybe limited object-level rollback, not a full-state rebuild of the identity behavior your business depends on. And three modern forces widen that gap every quarter:

  • ClickOps that nobody documented. IdPs are still largely configured by hand, without the version history, review gates, and rollback that DevOps takes for granted.
  • A control plane that's increasingly non-human. Service accounts, workload identities, and AI agents now outnumber people in many directories, and they're often more privileged. They make changes faster than any human can review, and a single rogue or over-permissioned agent can reshape access before anyone notices.
  • Attacks that corrupt, not just encrypt. Modern cyber incidents wipe environments and sabotage configuration. By the time the alarm sounds, the identity state you'd recover from may already be compromised.

Even the IdP's own safeguards can leave you stranded. An admin who deploys a configuration that can't be reverted has no button left to press.

Firefly's answer: make identity recoverable as code, then recover it

Firefly manages your most critical control planes the way it manages the rest of your cloud: as code that is immutable, versioned, governed, and recoverable. Identity is no exception. Whether you run Okta or Microsoft Entra ID (i.e. the two platforms that anchor identity for most of the enterprise world), Firefly brings the same resilience discipline to both.

Here's what identity resilience looks like in practice:

  • Codify identity config. Turn manually configured users, groups, roles, SSO and MFA policies, conditional access rules, and app assignments, along with the directory structure that holds them, from the AD forest behind hybrid Entra to Okta's org-level scaffolding, into Terraform / OpenTofu, at the click of a button.
  • Immutable, versioned snapshots. Point-in-time identity state that ransomware can't encrypt and an attacker can't quietly overwrite.
  • Guardrails on every change. Built-in and custom policies keep every modification to your IdP inside your organizational and compliance boundaries, including changes proposed by AI agents, before they ever reach production.
  • Drift detection and remediation. Get real-time alerts when identity configuration changes unexpectedly, and fix them automatically, so you can roll back to a known-good state in minutes instead of rebuilding from memory and scattered docs.
  • Clean recovery. Rebuild identity into a clean, isolated environment that's out of the attacker's reach. Recover out of the breach, not back into it.

Recovery, though, is only half of resilience. Rebuilding identity to a known-good state after an incident is essential, but staying resilient also means keeping the layer sound the rest of the time. Because Firefly manages identity as code, it gates every change before it reaches production, catches and remediates drift automatically, and continuously validates your resilience posture, fixing misconfigurations before they become the gap an incident walks through.

Prove recoverability in advance. Rebuild in minutes when it counts

Firefly wraps identity in the same two-part discipline it brings to cloud resilience:

Posture, before the incident. Firefly’s Cloud Resilience Posture Management (CRPM) capability gives you a continuous, real-time view of what's protected, what isn't, and whether each layer can actually be rebuilt. It exposes the single points of failure hiding across your clouds, regions, accounts, and your identity layer, and validates backups, replication, dependencies, and failover paths continuously, not just at audit time. You find the gaps before an incident does, instead of discovering them during a crisis.

Recovery, when the incident hits. Firefly rebuilds your full identity configuration in minutes, with RTO under an hour and audit-ready evidence for DORA, NIS2, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS: all generated continuously, so it's there when an auditor asks and proven when an outage or an attack strikes.

Identity doesn't fail in isolation, so don't recover it that way

This is the part most identity-backup tools miss. Your IdP is wired into everything: cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, networking, and every app your users sign into. Recover identity on its own and you end up with a tenant full of users who still can't reach systems that were rebuilt separately.

Firefly codifies and recovers your cloud infrastructure and SaaS estate. Therefore,  it restores identity together with the resources it controls: dependencies and relationships intact. Identity comes back first, so there's someone authorized to run the recovery; then the workloads that depend on it follow, wired to the access rules that were rebuilt alongside them. One platform. One known-good state. One recovery, where identity and infrastructure come back aligned.

Hope is not a strategy. Here’s what is. 

An identity outage isn't an “if” question. Whether it arrives on its own or as part of a cyber incident, cloud provider outage or AI-driven change that takes your wider environment with it, the only question that matters is whether your identity stack is recoverable when it happens, regardless of which IdP you run.

With Firefly, Okta and Entra ID aren't two separate problems to solve. They're one control plane you can prove is recoverable, govern continuously, and rebuild in minutes.

Want to see where your identity stack really stands? Take the Cloud Resilience Quiz or book a 24-minute demo and watch Firefly recover a full identity configuration, clean and ready, before you need it.

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