About F&I Sentinel
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F&I Sentinel is a leading compliance solutions provider for the automotive finance industry. The company partners with lenders, dealers, and administrators to ensure compliance across complex financial and regulatory environments. Given its role as a trusted compliance partner, resiliency and Disaster Recovery (DR)readiness are mission-critical for F&I Sentinel.
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The Challenge
As a compliance-first organization, F&I Sentinel operates in an environment where system availability and auditability are essential. Any downtime or data loss could result in regulatory breaches, customer impact, or reputational damage.
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The company faced three key challenges:
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- Strict compliance obligations requiring provable, repeatable DR strategies.
โ - Meeting Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs): RTO is the maximum acceptable time to restore services after a disruption. F&I Sentinel needed confidence that its systems could consistently meet stringent RTO requirements.
โ - Testing and audit overhead: Traditional DR testing was disruptive and costly, while regulators demanded complete transparency into infrastructure resiliency and recovery.
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The Firefly Solution
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F&I Sentinel adopted Fireflyโs Agentic Cloud Automation Platform to embed resiliency and compliance into every layer of its AWS operations.
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Firefly enabled the company to:
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- Maintain a unified system of record. Firefly continuously scans AWS and captures every resource/config into a single, versioned recorusing.
โ - Why this improves resilience: enables rapid drift detection and rollback to last known-good, and speeds root-cause by correlating incidents with precise configuration changes and actors, reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR).
โ - Generate and deploy Infrastructure-as-Code: From any point-in-time snapshot, Firefly generates IaC and automates redeployment into Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon VPC environments across AWS accounts or regions.
โ - Why this matters for resilience: automated, repeatable rebuilds reduce manual effort and ensure RTOs are consistently met. By keeping validated infrastructure templates always available, Firefly supports pilot light and warm standby strategies, making it easy to scale minimal environments into full production capacity during a disaster. This shortens recovery time and gives teams confidence in both real incidents and DR exercises. Firefly backs up and restores all infra resources including IAM, SQS, KMS, API GW, Lambda, EKS, CloudFront, and many more. All critical for business continuity and SLOs.
โ - Accelerate recovery and testing: Whether in response to a real incident or a DR test, Firefly recreates the entire AWS environment from hours or days ago, ensuring RTOs are consistently met. Redeployments are stored and versioned in Amazon S3. Firefly supports point-in-time infrastructure recovery, which can range from as frequent as 1hour to up to 4 days.
โ - Deliver audit-ready compliance: Firefly tracks every infrastructure change and produces an Infrastructure Bill of Materials (IBOM) a complete, point-in-time report of all AWS resources and configurations.
โ - Well-Architected Reliability Pillar: By baking resiliency principles into Infrastructure-as-Code and validating them continuously including shift-left in CI/CD pipelines, F&I Sentinel ensures its AWS workloads remain both resilient and compliant by design.
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The Results
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With Firefly, F&I Sentinel has transformed its resiliency and compliance posture:
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- RTOs consistently achieved: Firefly enables fast, reliable recovery within mandated timeframes, protecting both regulatory standing and customer trust.
โ - Simplified compliance audits: Continuous logs and full System of record visibility give auditors complete confidence in infrastructure resiliency
โ - Reduced DR testing burden: Automated redeployment shortens test cycles, enabling more frequent and less disruptive validations.
โ - Disaster Recovery readiness is built-in, aligned with Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and AWS regional DR strategies. Firefly is built for both in-region and cross-region Disaster Recovery, enabling recovery into existing or new AWS accounts. Customers can also easily adopt and integrate AWS native backup solutions alongside Fireflyโs automated redeployment, ensuring both infrastructure and data resiliency.
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Strategic Impact
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By leveraging Firefly, F&I Sentinel has achieved true cloud resiliency while fully adheringto compliance requirements. Firefly is now a core pillar of the companyโs Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR) strategy, ensuring regulatory readiness and customer confidence.
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"With Firefly.AI we can meet our compliance goals and ensure cloud resiliency for our customers and ourselves."
โ Jason Gaertner, Lead Site Reliability Engineer, F&I Sentinel
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Firefly & AWS
Firefly is fully built and deployed on AWS to deliver its Infrastructure-as-Code management and cloud governance solution at scale. As part of the AWS ISV-Accelerate program and holding the AWS DevOps ISV Competency, Firefly works closely with AWS to co-sell, drive customer success, and help organizations optimize and govern their cloud environments.