Recovering your data after an outage does not always mean your systems actually come back online. That gap, between getting your data back and running a working environment again, is exactly what ControlMonkey and AWS are now targeting together through a new Strategic Collaboration Agreement.
The problem sounds abstract until you picture it happening. Say your data survives an outage intact, but your authentication systems fail, your DNS settings break, or your identity and access permissions stop working. Your applications might still sit offline even though nothing actually disappeared. Traditional backup tools never really accounted for that kind of failure, and ControlMonkey says its platform closes that gap by restoring infrastructure states and configuration settings across AWS environments rather than just the data sitting inside them.
AWS already offers resilience tools through services like AWS Resilience Hub and AWS Backup, and ControlMonkey‘s approach works alongside those rather than replacing them, focusing specifically on the infrastructure and control-plane settings that teams often overlook. The platform continuously tracks configuration changes, catches infrastructure drifting from its intended state, and automates the process of restoring known-good environments, something that matters far more as companies spread workloads across dozens of AWS accounts with tangled dependencies running between them.
The financial case here is hard to ignore. Research from Splunk and Oxford Economics, which both companies cited, puts unplanned downtime costs for Forbes Global 2000 companies at roughly $600 billion a year, averaging around $15,000 per minute of downtime. When rebuilding a broken environment means engineers manually reconstructing settings under pressure while services stay down, those numbers add up fast.
ControlMonkey CEO Aharon Twizer described disaster recovery and cyber resilience as a natural extension of everyday cloud management, rather than something separate that only gets attention during a crisis. AWS’s Ed Pozarycki framed the partnership similarly, noting that customers already using AWS’s existing resilience tools gain an added layer of protection specifically for infrastructure and control-plane configurations, which he said strengthens overall resilience for production environments.
Beyond the technical integration, the agreement includes joint go-to-market work between the two companies, aimed at getting more AWS customers and partners to recognize that data recovery and environment recovery aren’t always the same thing.
