About Syntax
Syntax is a global provider of managed cloud services, hosting mission-critical ERP applications and enterprise workloads for thousands of customers. With a reputation built on trust and reliability, Syntax delivers services across AWS and hybrid environments, where uptime and resiliency are paramount.
The Challenge
As a managed service provider (MSP), resiliency is non-negotiable for Syntax. Their customers expect not only secure and scalable infrastructure, but also Disaster Recovery (DR) readiness that can withstand outages, regional failures, or help demonstrate disaster readiness during compliance audits..
Historically, DR planning and testing were painful:
- Siloed toolsets made it difficult to enforce consistent resiliency across multi-cloud environments.
- Manual DR testing was slow, disruptive, and often deprioritized due to the complexity and operational overhead.
- Regulatory compliance pressure required Syntax to prove repeatable recovery processes for customers in highly regulated industries.
The result: resiliency goals were clear, but execution and validation were time-consuming and costly.
The Firefly Solution
Syntax turned to Firefly’s Agentic Cloud Automation Platform to transform the way it manages resiliency and Disaster Recovery on AWS.
With Firefly, Syntax gained a unified and automated approach:
- Unified System-of-Record: Firefly constantly scans the entire cloud footprint of Syntax and updates all infrastructure configurations into a single, accurate System-of-Record.
Why this matters for resilience: maintaining an authoritative baseline allows detection of configuration drift in near real time, and enables teams to quickly correlate outages or incidents with configuration changes. This shortens root-cause analysis, speeds rollback to last known-good state, and reduces recovery time.
- Point-in-time Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)generation: Firefly enables the generation of Infrastructure-as-Code from all or part of the saved configurations, at any given point-in-time, stored and versioned in Amazon S3.
- Automated deployment: From the generated IaC, Firefly can seamlessly redeploy infrastructure into Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EKS environments.
- Rapid recovery for DR and incidents: In case of a Disaster, Incident, or even during DR testing, Firefly can recreate the entire infrastructure state from a few hours or days ago into a target AWS account or AWS Region. Firefly supports point-in-time infrastructure recovery, which can range from as frequent as 1 hour to up to 4 days.
- Flexible redeployment options: Firefly’s solution is robust enough to support redeployment into an existing account, a brand-new account, or even to a different AWS region.
- Audit-ready compliance: Firefly’s SoR maintains a complete change log and audit trail of every infrastructure change, enabling Syntax to meet strict compliance and audit requirements.
-
With these capabilities, Syntax now relies on Firefly to ensure both resiliency and operational efficiency across its AWS infrastructure.
Beyond DR, Syntax also leverages Firefly to enforce AWS Well-Architected best practices. Firefly bakes resiliency, security, and efficiency principles directly into Infrastructure-as-Code, ensuring that standards are continuously met not only across existing cloud resources, but also shift-left in the CI/CD pipeline whenever new changes are introduced.
The Results
With Firefly, Syntax achieved measurable improvements in resiliency and DR readiness:
- 80% faster DR testing cycles: What once required days of coordination and manual validation now takes hours.
- Higher test frequency: DR drills that used to happen annually can now be run quarterly or even monthly.
- Audit-ready compliance: Syntax can demonstrate resiliency guardrails and DRprocedures to customers and auditors at any time, backed by evidence from
- Customer confidence: End-customers trust that their mission-critical ERP workloads are protected against disruption and can recover quickly on AWS.
Strategic Impact
Syntax has achieved true cloud resiliency with Firefly, and now considers Firefly a key component of its Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy.
"With Firefly, resiliency is no longer a side project—it’s built into everything we do. We’ve transformed Disaster Recovery from a compliance burden into a competitive advantage for our customers."
— PatrickBingham, Global Director, Public Cloud Services, Syntax
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.