The IT Nerd

SIOS Technology Corp. today announced the results of its 2026 State of Application Resilience Survey, revealing that despite widespread adoption of HA/DR technologies, most enterprises continue to experience downtime, struggle with increasingly complex hybrid infrastructures, and lack confidence in their existing resilience strategies.

The survey gathered responses from more than 250 IT leaders across North America and the United Kingdom, representing predominantly large enterprises across industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government and technology. The research examined how organizations protect mission-critical applications from downtime and disasters while identifying emerging priorities for HA/DR investments.

Key findings include:

• Downtime remains a persistent problem. Seventy-six percent of organizations experienced at least one outage lasting more than 10 minutes over the past year despite having HA/DR protection in place, highlighting the limitations of many existing failover strategies.
• Hybrid and multicloud environments have become the norm. Nearly seven in ten organizations now run critical applications across hybrid infrastructures, while only 2% operate exclusively on-premises, increasing the complexity of maintaining application availability across diverse environments.
• Organizations lack confidence in their resilience strategies. Only about half of respondents said they were satisfied with their current HA/DR solutions, while many remained neutral or dissatisfied, suggesting existing solutions are falling short of enterprise expectations.
• Disaster recovery testing remains inconsistent. Only 7% of organizations perform monthly DR testing, while one-third test just annually and 22% don’t know how frequently testing occurs, creating significant recovery risk.
• Cybersecurity is reshaping HA priorities. Seventy-two percent of respondents either already use or would consider using HA clustering to streamline patch management, reflecting growing recognition that application availability and cyber resilience are increasingly interconnected.
• Complexity has overtaken cost as the biggest challenge. Configuration and management complexity ranked as organizations’ top HA/DR challenge, followed closely by integration across increasingly heterogeneous IT environments.
• Investment priorities continue to rise. Improving disaster recovery protection ranked second only to cybersecurity among planned IT investments over the next 18 months, demonstrating that organizations are actively budgeting to strengthen resilience.

The survey also found that Windows remains the dominant operating system for mission-critical applications, but organizations increasingly manage mixed Windows and Linux environments, reinforcing the need for cross-platform HA solutions. Respondents also indicated growing interest in application-aware clustering technologies that can simplify operations while improving resilience across heterogeneous infrastructures.

For more details, interested parties can download the complete 2026 State of Application Resilience Survey at: https://bit.ly/4x0smfY

SIOS Technology Corp. today announced that it has been named to the list of 2026 Best Places to Work in South Carolina for the seventh consecutive year. The annual program, created by SC Biz News in partnership with BridgeTower Media and Best Companies Group, recognizes and honors outstanding employers creating exceptional workplace experiences across South Carolina. Winners were recognized at a celebration event on Monday, August 24 at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

The program evaluates participating companies through a two-part assessment process including an employer questionnaire and confidential employee engagement survey measuring workplace culture, benefits, leadership and employee satisfaction. Companies recognized as a Best Place to Work in South Carolina demonstrate a strong commitment to employee experience, workplace excellence and organizational success.

The M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center at the University of South Carolina’s College of Engineering and Computing in Columbia serves as the home of SIOS’ research and development operations, as well as its professional services and support teams. SIOS has built strong ties to the University of South Carolina through its ongoing campus partnerships and maintains an active presence in the Columbia community, where employees engage in local initiatives and collaborate with the university’s Computer Science Department.

SIOS high availability and disaster recovery solutions have become the gold star standard for protecting critical Windows and Linux applications such as SQL Server, SAP HANA, and Oracle across cloud, hybrid cloud and data center environments from downtime and disasters.

SIOS Technology today announced the launch of Season 2 of its podcast series, Don’t Fail Me Now. Created for IT leaders, architects, and decision-makers, the podcast focuses on practical ways to reduce downtime, advance HA/DR initiatives, and support resilient, always-on systems.

Season 2 includes five weekly episodes, each 15–30 minutes long, with SIOS experts and industry guests sharing firsthand insights, best practices, and strategies for maintaining availability across complex environments. All episodes from Season 1 are also available on demand for listeners who want to catch up on earlier discussions.

Episodes will be released weekly on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

Season 2 Lineup

• Episode 1: Protecting the Protectors: High Availability for Security and Compliance Platforms – Justin Chandler, senior solutions engineer at Cimcor, Inc., explores how file integrity monitoring, compliance automation, and high availability work together to eliminate blind spots. He discusses reducing alert fatigue, enforcing secure configuration baselines, and preventing data loss during outages, as well as trends in automation, containerization, and DevSecOps.
• Episode 2: Behind the Scenes of Award-Winning Customer Support at SIOS – Sandi Hamilton, director of product support engineering at SIOS Technology, shares insights on building and leading a global 24×7 customer support team, prioritizing critical outages, collaborating across teams, and maintaining the human element in an AI-driven world.
• Episode 3: Why SQL Server Audits Go Wrong, and How to Prevent – Shawn M. Upchurch, founder and CEO of UpSearch, explains why traditional SQL Server audits fall short, how visibility gaps form in virtualized and hybrid environments, and what continuous governance looks like to avoid unexpected costs.
• Episode 4: Building the Future of High Availability – Devin Haynes, product owner at SIOS Technology, discusses how the SIOS product roadmap is shaped by customer feedback, market trends, and emerging technologies such as automation and AI, and what it takes to build resilient software.
• Episode 5: Why High Availability Matters in Video Surveillance – Chebel Bou Chebel, technology partner manager at Milestone Systems, explores how modern video management platforms are scaling, the role of partner ecosystems, and why designing for failure is essential in high-risk and regulated environments.

IT professionals can subscribe to Don’t Fail Me Now and listen on all major platforms:

• Spotify
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts

SIOS Technology today announced a new reseller partnership with Vaske (Vaske Computer, Inc), an IT services and consulting firm headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota. Through this agreement, Vaske will resell SIOS high availability and disaster recovery solutions along with related professional services to customers nationwide across the United States.

SIOS delivers innovative high availability and disaster recovery solutions that protect critical applications from downtime and data loss. SIOS LifeKeeper provides automated failover clustering to ensure continuous operation of essential applications, while SIOS DataKeeper offers real-time replication for high availability and disaster recovery across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Together, these solutions enable organizations to maintain uptime, protect data integrity, and ensure seamless business continuity.

Vaske specializes in Oracle-centric consulting and enterprise data environments, with deep expertise spanning cloud infrastructure, AI deployment, and enterprise managed services. The company supports customers across both project-based engagements and ongoing enterprise managed services, helping organizations maintain performance, availability, and security in complex hybrid IT environments.

As Vaske celebrates more than three decades in business, the partnership underscores its continued commitment to delivering reliable, enterprise-grade IT solutions.

For more information about SIOS Technology and its high availability solutions, visit www.us.sios.com. To learn more about Vaske, visit https://vaske-it.com/.

SIOS Technology Corp.today announced it has received three prestigious industry recognitions highlighting executive leadership, customer success excellence, and outstanding support performance.

Masahiro Arai, Chief Operating Officer of SIOS Technology, has been named to the South Carolina 500 by the SC Biz News. The South Carolina 500 honors the most influential business leaders across the state, recognizing executives who drive economic growth, innovation, and community impact. Arai’s inclusion reflects his leadership in expanding SIOS’ global presence and advancing its high availability solutions to support mission-critical enterprise environments.

In addition, SIOS Technology’s Vice President of Customer Success, Cassius Rhue, has been named a Silver Stevie® Award winner in the Customer Service Leader of the Year Individual category in the 2025 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service recognize outstanding achievements by contact centers, customer service, business development, and sales professionals worldwide. Rhue was honored for his leadership in building a high-performing customer success organization focused on proactive engagement, rapid response, and measurable customer outcomes.

Further underscoring the company’s commitment to customer excellence, SIOS Technology was named a Silver winner for Support Department of the Year in the 2025 Best in Biz Awards. The Best in Biz Awards recognize companies, teams, and executives for outstanding performance and innovation across industries. The Support Department of the Year award acknowledges SIOS’ dedication to delivering responsive, expert-level support that ensures customers maintain continuous uptime for their critical applications and databases.

SIOS Technology provides high availability and disaster recovery solutions that protect mission-critical applications in physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments. By combining application-aware intelligence with expert customer engagement, SIOS helps enterprises minimize downtime, reduce operational risk, and maintain business continuity in increasingly complex IT landscapes. With these latest recognitions, SIOS continues to demonstrate leadership not only in technology innovation, but also in customer-centric execution and operational excellence.

SIOS Technology Corp. today announced that Masahiro Arai, Chief Operating Officer, has been named to the 2025 South Carolina 500 list of Most Influential Business Leaders by SC Biz News.

The South Carolina 500 is a premier recognition program celebrating the most influential and accomplished professionals shaping the state’s economy across industries through leadership, innovation, and community impact. Arai’s selection highlights his visionary leadership at SIOS Technology and his contributions to advancing resilient IT infrastructure for organizations across critical sectors.

In his role, Arai oversees the company’s day-to-day business operations, driving alignment across product management, engineering, sales, and marketing teams to deliver innovative HA and DR solutions. Under his leadership, SIOS Technology has expanded its capabilities and fortified its market position, helping organizations maintain continuity for essential workloads across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Arai’s career began with a Master’s degree in Electronic Engineering, Robotics from Tokyo Denki University and spans engineering, product management, sales, and technical leadership roles. Despite his senior position, he remains deeply engaged with technology innovation, regularly working with teams on proof-of-concept solutions that respond to customer and partner needs.

The South Carolina 500 list serves as a definitive guide to influential business leaders across sectors who are driving growth, creating opportunity, and elevating the state’s economic landscape.

 SIOS Technology Corp. today announced its 2026 technology predictions from Cassius Rhue, Vice President of Customer Experience. Rhue forecasts that high availability will expand far beyond uptime, becoming a core enabler of cybersecurity resilience, hybrid cloud operations, AI reliability, and simplified IT management.

“By 2026, IT admins will require clustering tools for high availability and disaster recovery that provide far greater visibility and control across increasingly complex environments,” said Rhue. “Hybrid cloud, cybersecurity pressures, and AI-driven workloads are fundamentally reshaping what organizations expect from HA and DR platforms.”

Key 2026 Predictions Include:

• Hybrid and Multicloud Strategies Gain Momentum – Hybrid and Multicloud solutions have become a more proven option to help organizations balance performance, cost, and resilience while avoiding vendor lock-in.  More enterprises will continue to consider and adopt hybrid and multicloud architectures in 2026. As a result, HA solutions that can seamlessly operate across diverse infrastructures will become indispensable to modern IT strategies.
• Cybersecurity Will Redefine the Role of High Availability – The rising wave of cybersecurity threats is transforming how enterprises view HA clustering. In 2026, HA will not only be about achieving 99.99% uptime—it will also serve as a vital tool for maintaining security resilience. More organizations will use HA clusters to enable rapid, low-risk patching and updates, ensuring systems remain both highly available and protected against emerging threats.
• High Availability Focuses on Ease of Use to Meet Growing IT Admin Needs – As IT administrators and generalists are given increasing responsibility for managing complex high availability (HA) application environments, the demand for intuitive, automated HA solutions will surge. In 2026, IT teams will favor platforms that do not require specialized HA skills, minimize manual configuration and simplify cluster management. Vendors that prioritize ease of use, automation, and guided workflows will stand out as the market evolves toward accessibility for non-specialist admins.
• DevOps teams will increasingly integrate high availability clustering into application planning to reduce deployment risk – Clustering tools with robust APIs, automation hooks, and real-time observability will allow rapid updates without interrupting production services. DevOps engineers will use clusters to test patches against active workloads, reducing the risk and degree of change. HA becomes a built-in feature of the delivery process—not an afterthought.
• Continuous Availability: The New Foundation for Trusted AI – AI and ML workloads will run more frequently on distributed clusters and GPU-intensive systems, where downtime creates costly disruptions. In 2026, IT admins will demand high availability solutions that simplify complex AI stacks and expose full visibility into data, storage, and node health. Continuous availability becomes a prerequisite for AI reliability and trust.
• Observability Becomes Essential for Complex IT Environments – As IT infrastructures expand across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, visibility into application performance and health and interdependencies of the elements of the IT stack will become mission-critical. In 2026, observability will emerge as a key differentiator for HA solutions, allowing IT teams to identify and resolve issues before they impact uptime. The most successful HA platforms will provide deep insights across the full stack—from hardware to application layer.
• Consolidation of Virtual Application Environments Drives Up Complexity and Need for Easy-to-Manage HA – As enterprises consolidate onto virtualized platforms, IT admins will manage more mission-critical workloads per host. HA clustering will provide automated and intelligent failover across hypervisors without requiring deep virtualization expertise. Growing cybersecurity pressures will drive adoption of cluster-based patch automation to protect large pools of VMs simultaneously. Virtualized environments won’t just run clusters—they will depend on them.
• Growing need for Automated Disaster Recovery – By 2026, high availability and disaster recovery IT admins will expect clustering tools to support disaster recovery locations with automate failover, verify replication integrity, and give full visibility into the entire application stack—including networking, storage, and cloud resources. Frequent cyber incidents will force DR teams to apply patches and recover systems rapidly, with clusters minimizing downtime during failover. Disaster recovery becomes proactive, not reactive.

 SIOS Technology Corp. today announced the launch of its new podcast series, Don’t Fail Me Now. Aimed at IT leaders, system architects, and business decision-makers, the podcast delivers practical strategies for preventing downtime, improving high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), and strengthening IT resilience in an always-on world.

The inaugural season of Don’t Fail Me Now features six weekly episodes, each 15–30 minutes long. SIOS experts and industry thought leaders share lessons learned from real-world deployments, discuss the latest HA/DR best practices, and explore the technologies and partnerships that help organizations keep critical applications and data continuously available.

Episodes will be released weekly, with the first episode already available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

Season 1 Lineup

• Episode 1: HA/DR and Business Impact – Margaret Hoagland, vice president of global sales & marketing, SIOS, discusses the business risks of downtime, why HA and DR strategies must work together, and how organizations can prepare for the future of IT resilience.
• Episode 2: Linux and LifeKeeper – Aaron West, sales engineer, SIOS, explores why Linux remains a top choice for HA deployments, how SIOS LifeKeeper supports these environments, and what IT teams need to know to get started.
• Episode 3: ARKs and Their Use Cases – Cassius Rhue, vice president, Customer Success, SIOS, breaks down Application Recovery Kits (ARKs), their top use cases, and how they simplify HA/DR deployments across industries.
• Episode 4: The Role of SIOS DataKeeper – Joey D’Antoni, principal consultant at Denny Cherry and Associates Consulting, explains the role of SIOS DataKeeper in enabling efficient storage replication for hybrid and multi-cloud environments and strengthening SQL Server resilience.
• Episode 5: Common Customer Misconceptions – Greg Tucker, senior product (Windows) support engineer, SIOS, addresses common myths about HA/DR, from reliance on cloud provider uptime to SQL Server Always On, and offers practical guidance.
  
• Episode 6: SIOS Partnerships – Harry Aujla, director of partner alliances, and Kelly Burke, partner alliance director, SIOS, reflect on SIOS’s long-standing partnerships with cloud providers and ISVs, the lessons learned, and the opportunities shaping the next era of resilience.

Listen and Subscribe

IT professionals can subscribe to Don’t Fail Me Now and listen on all major platforms:

• Spotify
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts

SIOS Technology Corp today announced the availability of LifeKeeper v10, featuring the new LifeKeeper Web Management Console (LKWMC) management console. LKWMC provides a unified, intuitive user interface across both Linux and Windows environments, giving system administrators unprecedented visibility and control while dramatically simplifying the management of complex, mission-critical high availability and disaster recovery configurations.

New in SIOS LifeKeeper v10:

• LifeKeeper/Windows Management Console (LKWMC): Delivers simplified HA management with a consistent interface across Windows and Linux operating systems, enabling cost-saving ease-of-use for MSPs and organizations managing applications across multiple operating systems. New design includes built-in tips and tools for further streamlined integration.
• Enhanced Disaster Recovery in Red Hat Environments: The DRBD Application Recovery Kit (ARK) for LifeKeeper now offers seamless integration with RHEL 9.6 and RHEL 10, extending 3- and 4-node disaster recovery capabilities to a wider user base.
• DataKeeper Replication Support for RHEL 10: DataKeeper Linux delivers straightforward, cost-effective data replication and high availability on RHEL 10, along with other supported operating systems.
• Native PowerShell support. PowerShell is now supported as a scripting language for building Generic Application Recovery Kits, offering greater flexibility and ease of automation.
• Improved Installer Interface: A redesigned installer provides a streamlined experience, allowing users to select all required components from a single, intuitive screen.

Pricing and Availability

SIOS LifeKeeper v10 is currently generally available. SIOS software is priced by the server node and offers perpetual, subscription and consumption (cloud marketplace) options.

SIOS Technology announced today that it has achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Resilience Software Competency in the Design category. This specialization recognizes SIOS as an AWS Partner that provides validated solutions to help customers improve their critical systems availability and resilience posture using AWS Resilience Services. As each customer and their critical workloads have unique availability requirements, AWS Resilience Competency Partners provide tailored guidance and solutions to achieve the highest system uptime needs.

Complex systems are susceptible to a variety of failures, both small and large, throughout their lifespan, including code deployment issues, infrastructure problems, data and state failures, and natural disasters. As a result, organizations must plan for and expect system failures, and design their systems to withstand and recover from failures with minimal impact to end users. Remote teams, distributed systems, and frequent releases further highlight the need for increased resilience in today’s business environment.

Achieving the AWS Resilience Competency in the Design category differentiates SIOS as an AWS Partner that has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success supporting customers’ resilience goals. SIOS is equipped to handle resilience related application challenges, especially as expectations from customers shift towards an ‘always on, always available’ mindset. It’s important for organizations to expect and plan for system failures, and design workloads to recover from failure in a way that minimally impacts their end users. Additionally, when onboarding critical workloads to the cloud, such as online banking, stock-trading, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) or online sales platforms, higher uptime requirements have become a minimal requirement. AWS Resilience Competency Partner SIOS provides professional consulting and engineering services that are validated by AWS experts in the design category. This standardized approach allows customers to achieve their resilience goals in the cloud with the expert assistance of AWS Resilience Competency Partners.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, the AWS Competency Program helps customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

SIOS high availability solutions are designed to protect mission-critical applications and databases in AWS environments. SIOS LifeKeeper provides intelligent application-aware failover clustering to automatically detect failures and recover applications and data in seconds, minimizing disruption and data loss. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition delivers real-time, block-level data replication to ensure data integrity across AWS Availability Zones or Regions. Together, these solutions deliver the high availability, reliability, and flexibility required to meet the demanding uptime requirements of enterprise customers running workloads on AWS.