The Buyer's Guide to Cyber Resilience for Cloud Applications

Why data backup alone can't save your business (and what comes next)

Learn how your DR plan should look like

What you'll get from this guide

In March 2026, a cyberattack shut down Stryker's global operations for nearly a month. Months earlier, an AWS outage took 1,000+ companies offline for 15 hours. Neither incident was about lost data. The infrastructure collapsed, and rebuilding it by hand took weeks.

Now add AI agents that can provision, modify and delete infrastructure in seconds, and cyberattacks built to corrupt configurations and wipe environments outright. The exposure is no longer data loss. It's weeks of downtime, missed RTO commitments, and regulators asking questions you can't answer.

This guide is written for the people who own that risk. It explains why backup alone leaves the business exposed, what to look for when evaluating recovery vendors, and the DR strategy leading enterprises are using to strengthen their estate, recover complete environments in minutes, and prove it to every regulator.

About Firefly

Firefly is the Cloud Resilience platform that helps enterprises recover from cyberattacks, outages, and AI agents' errors. By using Infrastructure-as-Code, Firefly restores complete environments, including every resource and dependency, into a clean region or account, getting your business up and running in minutes, not weeks. Recognized by Gartner in the Cloud Application Infrastructure Recovery (CAIRS) category in both 2025 and 2026.
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The Hidden Crisis in Disaster Recovery

IaC Adoption ≠ Recovery Readiness
Most enterprises have adopted Infrastructure-as-Code. Few can actually rebuild their infrastructure from it. That gap between 'we have IaC' and "we can be back online in an hour" is the difference between a service interruption and weeks of lost revenue, missed contractual RTOs, and an audit you can't pass.
The Recovery Time Disconnect
Leadership expects recovery in hours. Manual, undocumented rebuilds routinely take weeks. Closing that gap requires a trusted, executable blueprint of every asset, held outside the blast radius.
Ransomware targets infrastructure, not just data
Modern attacks take down the environment itself. Backup tools restore data into infrastructure that no longer exists. Getting back to business means rebuilding clean environments quickly, reliably, and under pressure.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 35% of organizations will utilize CAIRS solutions to complement infrastructure-as-code disaster recovery orchestration, up from less than 5% in 2026, a 10× jump.

— Gartner, Top Trends in Backup and Data Protection for 2026 (Michael Hoeck, March 2026)

From Backup to Resilience, in 3 Phases

What a credible recovery program looks like, and the questions to ask any vendor claiming to deliver it

What resilience looks like in 2026 and beyond

01. Cyber resilience replaces breach prevention as the primary security KPI

Boards are already shifting investment from 'stop every attack' to 'recover from any attack.' Assume-breach becomes the default operating mode, and recovery speed becomes the number auditors, insurers, and CFOs actually track.

02. Infrastructure recovery becomes a standard line item in the DR stack

Gartner projects a 10× jump in CAIRS adoption by 2030. Expect procurement checklists, RFPs, and cyber-insurance questionnaires to explicitly ask how you rebuild infrastructure, not just how you back up data.

03. AI agents force codified guardrails on every environment

Agents that provision, modify, and destroy infrastructure at machine speed make undocumented environments untenable. Teams without executable blueprints and blast-radius controls will lose the ability to safely deploy agents at all.

04. RTOs collapse from days to under an hour

2-6 hour RTOs are already contractual for most enterprises. The teams treating recovery as software — tested weekly, deployed in minutes — will set a new bar.

Stop backing up just data. Start rebuilding your infra.

See what leading enterprises are doing to cut recovery from weeks to under an hour, and what to demand from any vendor before you sign.

Get the guide