Autonomous Cloud Operations (ACO) by Firemind

About Autonomous Cloud Operations (ACO)

Autonomous Cloud Operations (ACO) replaces the reactive managed-service model with autonomous operations across your AWS estate. AI agents continuously monitor signals, diagnose incidents, fulfil service requests, and remediate security findings — operating within explicit guardrails you define. Routine, pre-approved work runs in your environment. Firemind engineers step in when context, judgement, or escalation is needed.

Why the traditional MSP model breaks

Linear cost scaling, execution gaps between recommendations and action, knowledge that walks out the door at staff turnover, and annual price increases you cannot negotiate away. Firemind built a leading European MSP — and is now replacing the model with autonomy.

What ACO delivers

• Incident resolution — auto-detect, diagnose, and remediate infrastructure issues in minutes, not hours. Episodes replace tickets.
• Service requests — same-day provisioning of EC2 instances, EBS storage, and IAM with built-in policy compliance. Tickets become audit metadata.
• Security and compliance — continuous posture management with findings remediated automatically. Full audit trails.
• Cost optimisation — right-sizing and waste cleanup executed inside risk-based guardrails, not stuck in a backlog.

How it works — autonomy with human control

ACO ingests signals from your existing ITSM, observability, security, and FinOps tooling — no retooling required. A closed-loop cycle of Plan, Validate, Execute, and Reflect runs against your runbooks, CMDB, ticket history, and team knowledge, augmented with Firemind core skills and customer-specific skills.

Every action is governed by a default-deny model. Permissible Actions define what ACO is allowed to do (per-tenant, per-environment); Skills define what ACO knows how to do. Risk-based execution: low and medium-risk actions auto-execute, high-risk actions require approval, and critical actions require approval plus review. Every decision is logged and auditable.

Audited outcomes from live production

• 93% of first-line tickets resolved autonomously (baseline: 220 tickets per month)
• P2 resolution in 9 minutes, down from 2 hours — below SLA targets
• P3 resolution in 8 hours, down from 33 hours — consistent delivery
• 65+ engineering hours per month reclaimed for product development and tech-debt reduction
• 50%+ run-cost reduction across transformed processes

Progressive autonomy — you control the pace

• Phase 1, Discovery: read-only assessment of your estate, zero operational risk.
• Phase 2, Assisted: ACO suggests actions, engineers approve every execution (around 30% automation).
• Phase 3, Supervised: low-risk auto-executes, high-risk needs approval (around 60% automation).
• Phase 4, Autonomous: full automation with oversight, humans handle exceptions only (around 90% automation).

Autonomy expands based on verified success, not time alone.

Prove it in 8 weeks

• Weeks 1-2, Discovery and onboarding: baseline your estate, connect signals, first read-only actions.
• Weeks 2-4, Observe and first actions: ACO begins resolving with engineer approval on every action.
• Weeks 3-7, Expand autonomy: low-risk auto-executes, metrics accumulate.
• Week 8, Business case review: MTTR, automation rate, cost per host. Your data, your decision.

Suggested pilot scope: 40-50 VMs in non-production. No long-term commitment. Exit anytime, no lock-in.

AWS services managed by ACO

ACO operates against Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon VPC, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Trusted Advisor. Additional AWS services can be onboarded via custom Skills during pilot or production engagement.

About Firemind

AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. 200+ clients since 2018, around 100-person team, 30+ accreditations, 64% growth in FY23/24. ISO 27001 certified. In partnership with AWS, NVIDIA, and Anthropic. Core markets: UK and Ireland, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands.