Eh, this is a colloqualism I can get behind, though "firm"-ware is actually just a different type of software.

"Hardware" meaning that it's very inflexible, "software" meaning that it is comparatively flexible, "wetware" meaning that it inherently lacks order. ;)

Serverless and cloud servers can both do that.

of course; doubtless many others have observed the same reality of cloud compute

You still have outages when you run your own hardware and systems.

What would that look like for your company compared to the cloud?

Depends really. I am the entire ops team for a non-profit volunteer org, I host their services on the cloud specifically so when something fails I don't have to do anything. Would much rather have a cloud computing company's ops team working to fix the issue instead and we'll just pay our monthly dues.

The same can be said of many smaller companies where uptime can be maintained cheaper and more consistently by offloading ops work to a cloud computing company.

You don't have to if you plan your disaster recovery scenarios correctly.