Nearly every engineering domain is evolving to *Ops - starting with DevOps and CloudOps, now AIOps, MLOps, SecOps - and everything in between.  This is because, as our stacks and engineering domains grow more complex, there simply isn’t enough human manpower to intervene for every single issue and alert that arises. This is compounded as engineers face a constant storm of alerts from tools like CSPM, ASPM, and KSPM, requiring them to have much broader expertise across many domains and technologies––which is becoming a nearly impossible feat to master.

The *Ops practices have enabled engineering teams to automate repetitive tasks, and achieve greater efficiencies in managing complex operations at scale––and remediation tasks are no different.

Enter RemOps—Remediation Operations—a new approach to automating the resolution of repetitive and complex operational tasks. RemOps turns alert fatigue and manual intervention into repeatable, automated workflows.

The Problem: Drowning in Alerts without Context

For cloud and platform engineers, the sheer volume of alerts from various systems can be overwhelming––and many are constantly suffering from alert fatigue. Security posture tools like CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), ASPM (Application Security Posture Management), and KSPM (Kubernetes Security Posture Management) bombard users with a barrage of findings, vulnerabilities that all scream “FIX NOW!” with the same amount of urgency. 

The real challenge lies not in identifying issues but in knowing what to do next, and which tasks really require immediate attention. Without clear, actionable steps, these alerts often become background noise, leaving vulnerabilities unaddressed and inefficiencies unresolved.

We’ve historically written and spoken about incident management playbooks as code, and we’ve taken this concept one step further - automated playbooks for all kinds of remediation scenarios. The gifts of codification are many, and we love to shout this from the rooftops.  What codification makes possible for incident management is quite the same for remediation, when designed and implemented with the right guardrails in place.

The RemOps Principles

RemOps is about transforming alerts into action. By leveraging automation, AI, and contextual intelligence, RemOps streamlines remediation workflows to ensure swift, reliable, and scalable resolutions to common problems. 

There are several reasons that have made such automation and operationalization of common tasks, risky to nearly impossible to implement, until today.  

• Insufficient Context
• Governance and Compliance
• Fears of Breakage and Downtime
• Security Concerns

Let’s dig in a little more.

Insufficient Context 

Many alerts lack actionable context, leaving engineers guessing the root cause and the proper resolution. They are tasked with going down unknown rabbit holes of issues they didn’t create, code they didn’t deploy, and systems they haven’t built––and are then required to have context about all of these and also provide a suitable resolution, swiftly, with no downtime.  Sound familiar?

With RemOps, tools like KICS and OPA analyze infrastructure definitions, such as Terraform files or Kubernetes manifests, to provide precise remediation steps––saving engineers a lot of time on research and the ultimate deployment of remediation solutions. 

The solution: Contextual Intelligence.

Alerts are only as useful as the context they provide. When an alert is triggered, these tools analyze the specific configuration or code that caused the issue. For instance, if a misconfiguration in a Terraform file leads to an exposed storage bucket, RemOps will generate a remediation plan that details the exact code change required to secure the bucket. Similarly, for Kubernetes configurations, RemOps identifies the root cause of policy violations and suggests adjustments, such as updating resource limits or fixing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) settings. By tailoring these suggestions to the user’s environment and infrastructure as code (IaC), the RemOps approach eliminates guesswork, accelerates resolution, and ensures compliance.

Governance and Compliance

In engineering organizations that are constantly deploying code at high-scale, it’s just a matter of time before someone violates policies that have more serious implications. While the resolution needs to be swift––sometimes automating remediation can also raise governance concerns, especially in highly regulated industries. 

The Solution: Policy-Driven Workflows. 

RemOps integrates policies into CI/CD workflows, embedding compliance checks at every stage, where governance frameworks are embedded into the remediation process. For example, RemOps policies allow for guardrails to fail deployment processes during “Plan” or “Apply” stages if policy violations are detected, ensuring compliance and security.  By enforcing rules during “Plan” and “Apply” phases, teams can automate fixes while maintaining control and auditability so there are no policy deviations.

Fears of Breakage and Downtime 

One of the greatest fears with automation is the risk of unintended consequences. Engineers often worry that automated remediations might lead to unexpected behavior or even critical downtime. For example, an automated fix for a security misconfiguration might unintentionally disrupt operations. In other cases, changes to infrastructure settings could trigger cascading failures. Even minor adjustments, like updating a Kubernetes configuration, could result in pod evictions or crashes if resource limits and scheduling constraints aren't fully considered. These fears stem from the inherent complexity of modern systems, where even well-intentioned automation can lead to unforeseen interactions and wide-reaching impacts.

The Solution: AI-Powered Automation

RemOps mitigates this by offering controlled automation with guardrails, while leveraging powerful AI pattern recognition capabilities to ensure fixes are validated and avoid breakage. Whether it’s a security misconfiguration or an unused resource, AI can identify patterns and propose or even execute remediation steps. This enables engineers to think less about the problem and focus on higher-order tasks.

Security Concerns

Security is another major barrier to remediation automation––where there’s always the fear of introducing greater risks when automating fixes. For instance, a poorly scoped automated script might overcorrect permissions, granting excessive access and exposing sensitive data, or, an automated remediation for drift might inadvertently reset configurations to insecure defaults if the underlying policies are not well-defined. These concerns are amplified in complex environments, where diverse systems and policies can make it difficult to predict the full security implications of an automated action. As a result, organizations are often hesitant to trust automation with tasks that could have security consequences.

The Solution: Codification of All Resources

One of the most labor-intensive tasks in cloud operations is managing resources outside infrastructure-as-code frameworks, and this is also because they are much more difficult to secure as well.  Security patches and policies that are applied in a unified way across systems, environments and clusters with codified resources, remain out of scope and unmanaged with uncodified resources. RemOps identifies these unmanaged resources and automates their codification, bringing them under governance frameworks, reducing security risks. For instance,  automated detection and remediation of uncodified resources can help with the discovery of drifted configurations and prevent misconfigurations that may expose systems to vulnerabilities.

Examples of RemOps in Action

1. AI Governance & Remediation for Cloud Waste: Firefly’s integration of KICS and OPA ensures that Terraform definitions are automatically remediated when misconfigurations are detected. Unused resources and drifted configurations can cost businesses millions. RemOps automates cloud waste & improves cloud governance, providing actionable steps to reclaim cost efficiency.
2. Drift Remediation: Drift in cloud resources not only introduces inefficiencies but may also violate security and compliance policies. RemOps provides automated remediation for drift through immediately deployable code fixes.

RemOps and the Future of Operational Resilience

Until now, the operational landscape has relied heavily on manual intervention for remediation tasks. This approach is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. RemOps marks a shift toward automation-first thinking, where eventually we will reach sufficient maturity where not every alert requires human involvement. By automating what can be streamlined, teams can focus on the tasks that truly require their expertise.

RemOps isn’t just a solution for today’s challenges; it’s a framework for the future. As AI and machine learning capabilities evolve, we can expect even greater contextual accuracy and more robust remediation workflows. Imagine a world where every operational alert is paired with a clear, actionable, and automated path to resolution. That’s the promise of RemOps.

While today there are still sanity checks before automating fixes, in the future we believe the maturity of the RemOps domain will make it possible to automate repeatable and common fixes, without any manual intervention based on intelligent workflows and predefined policies. For engineers and organizations alike, this represents a leap forward, similar to what DevOps brought to the infrastructure operations domain, enabling them to think less and act more.