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Check your cloud’s breach resilience in minutes, not weeks
The Dawnguard and Invictus partnership started with a question: what would it look like if thousands of hours of cloud incident response became a check you could run against your own environment in minutes? Here’s the answer.
Invictus Incident Response built the Breach Resilience Blueprint from those thousands of hours in the trenches: 15 critical controls across 5 steps, the ones that actually decide whether a breach is a footnote or a catastrophe. Dawnguard now runs that blueprint directly against your Azure cloud environment, so you can check your breach resilience in minutes instead of weeks.
What is cloud breach resilience?
Cloud breach resilience is how well your environment can detect, withstand, and recover from a breach. You measure it by checking the controls that decide the outcome: logging retention, identity hardening, network exposure, storage configuration, and secret management. The Invictus Breach Resilience Blueprint scores 15 of those controls across 5 steps, so you get a clear answer in minutes instead of a weeks-long manual audit.
Breaches rarely succeed because of some exotic zero-day. They succeed because the logs weren’t there, the admin had a password instead of a passkey, RDP was open to the internet, the storage account was public, and the Key Vault held credentials that never expired. Boring failures, repeated over and over. The blueprint targets exactly those and scores each control against the Azure Well-Architected Framework so you see what it costs in operations and budget, not just what it buys in security.
Step 1: Cloud logging and visibility
Default 30-day cloud logging is a liability. Without at least 180 days of immutable logs, forensic reconstruction is often impossible, which means incomplete recovery, longer investigations, and legal exposure. The black box has to exist before the crash.
Step 2: Identity and access management
Most modern breaches involve credential theft, and attackers now use adversary-in-the-middle tactics to bypass standard MFA. Phishing-resistant MFA and blocked legacy authentication close the front door that most threat actors still use.
Step 3: Network exposure
Unrestricted management ports are a very common entry for ransomware crews which are later used for data exfiltration. Kill public RDP and SSH, gate web traffic behind a WAF, and an attacker who lands on a web server can’t pivot to your database.
Step 4: Storage configuration
Misconfigured public access turns blob storage into a blind spot and a staging ground for stolen data. Private connectivity plus soft delete makes your business-critical data hard to steal and nearly impossible to destroy.
Step 5: Key Vault and secret management
If an attacker is in your environment, the vault is the prize. Secret expiration and purge protection aren’t compliance box-checks. They’re kill switches for compromised credentials and persistence.
The blueprint has always been good guidance. Now it’s a check you can run. Open Dawnguard, point it at your cloud, and see where you stand against all five steps.
Frequently asked questions
What is cloud breach resilience?
Cloud breach resilience is how well your environment can detect, withstand, and recover from a breach. It comes down to a handful of controls: how long you keep immutable logs, how hard your identities are to phish, how exposed your management ports are, how your storage is configured, and how your secrets are managed.
How do you check cloud breach resilience?
Point Dawnguard at your cloud. Currently, it runs the Breach Resilience Blueprint for Azure, 15 critical controls across 5 steps, and scores each one against the Azure Well-Architected Framework. You get a clear answer in minutes instead of a weeks-long manual audit. In the near future, the blueprint will expand to other clouds.
What are the five steps of the Breach Resilience Blueprint?
Visibility (cloud logging), identity (phishing-resistant MFA), network (closing management ports), storage (private access and soft delete), and Key Vault and secret management (expiration and purge protection). Each step targets a failure that decides whether a breach is a footnote or a catastrophe.
Who created the Breach Resilience Blueprint?
Invictus Incident Response built the Breach Resilience Blueprint from thousands of hours of cloud incident response. Dawnguard and Invictus partnered to turn that field experience into a check you can run: Invictus brings the frontline knowledge of how breaches actually unfold, and Dawnguard runs the controls directly against your environment and scores them against the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
