The IT Nerd

Today’s 2026 predictions come from Cassius Rhue, VP of Customer Experience, SIOS Technology.

1) Cloud Computing

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.”

2) Cybersecurity

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.”

3) Data Management

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.”

4) DevOps

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.”

5) AI / Machine Learning

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.”

6) Application Performance Management (APM)

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.”

7) Virtualization

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.”

8) Disaster Recovery

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.”

“By 2026, IT admins will require clustering tools for high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) to support greater visibility into and control of failover operations and environments. The rapidly evolving landscape of hybrid cloud and multicloud environments will demand sophisticated solutions capable of providing full visibility into the entire application stack—including networking, storage, and cloud resources— while simultaneously helping advance organizational cybersecurity processes and posture.”

 SIOS Technology Corp today announced that Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad has achieved 99.99% uptime and ensured uninterrupted availability for its critical SAP and Oracle operations in the AWS cloud using SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux. With SIOS, Astro has strengthened business continuity and operational efficiency across its enterprise systems while gaining confidence in the resiliency of its cloud infrastructure.

Astro, Malaysia’s leading content and entertainment provider, serves 5.2 million homes, 8,900 businesses, 16.3 million weekly radio listeners, and 13.5 million monthly digital visitors. As the company migrated its core SAP and Oracle database systems to AWS, it required a robust HA solution certified by SAP, AWS, and Oracle Linux capable of delivering seamless uptime, protecting against failures, and minimizing management complexity.

After extensive evaluation, Astro selected SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux, the only SAP-certified HA solution supported by AWS for Oracle Linux, for its proven reliability, ease of administration, and performance assurance.

SIOS made it possible to move the most important business systems to AWS with complete confidence. Their team provided excellent support and regular communication, helping us maintain a high-performing HA environment every step of the way.

Reliable Results and Operational Efficiency

Since implementing SIOS, Astro has achieved measurable success, including:

• 99.99% uptime: Downtime has been effectively eliminated, allowing Astro to maintain low recovery time (RTO) and recovery point (RPO) objectives.
• Operational efficiency: Minimal administrative effort is required, freeing IT staff to focus on higher-value strategic projects.
• Confidence in resilience: The IT team no longer worries about outages or data loss, ensuring critical SAP applications remain continuously available.
• Cost avoidance: By preventing unplanned downtime, Astro has avoided significant financial and operational disruption across the company.

With SIOS providing reliable HA and DR protection on AWS, Astro continues to enhance its cloud-based infrastructure and expand services with confidence in its ability to maintain continuous availability and performance.

 SIOS Technology Corp. today announced that it has been named the 2025 Best Places to Work in South Carolina list for the sixth consecutive year. The annual program, created by SC Biz News in partnership with the Best Companies Group, honors workplaces that demonstrate a strong commitment to their employees and communities. Winners were recognized at a celebration event on Monday, August 25 at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

The headquarters of SIOS’ research and development facility as well as its professional services and support departments are located at the M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center at the University of South Carolina’s College of Engineering and Computing in Columbia. In addition to its campus partnerships, SIOS is an active contributor to the greater Columbia community, with employees participating in local initiatives and collaborating closely with the University of South Carolina’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 datacenter environments from downtime and disasters.

SIOS Technology Corp. today announced that its flagship product, SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux version 9.9.0, has received two distinguished industry honors recognizing its innovation and leadership in business technology solutions.

SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux was named a Gold Stevie® Award winner in the 2025 American Business Awards® in the Business Technology – Softwarecategory. The American Business Awards are the premier business awards program in the U.S., honoring organizations for outstanding achievement and innovation across industries.

In addition, SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux earned a Silver Titan Business Award in the Business Technology Solutions – Business Continuity Solution category. The Titan Awards celebrate excellence in enterprise products and solutions that drive organizational resilience, agility, and digital transformation.

SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux delivers comprehensive HA/DR protection for both physical and virtual Linux environments, enabling enterprises to safeguard critical workloads with intelligent application-aware monitoring, fast failover, and seamless recovery. Version 9.9.0 introduced significant enhancements, including expanded support for leading enterprise applications, improved automation, and deeper integration with cloud and hybrid IT environments.

With these wins, SIOS continues its long-standing leadership in high availability and resilience technology, helping enterprises worldwide reduce downtime, simplify operations, and achieve business continuity.

SIOS Technology today announced that EGGER Group, a global leader in wood-based materials manufacturing, has achieved 99.99% uptime for its mission-critical applications using SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux. With SIOS, EGGER has ensured uninterrupted operations across its 22 manufacturing facilities in 11 countries, safeguarding essential SAP, Oracle, and custom applications from downtime.

EGGER, headquartered in St. Johann, Tyrol, Austria, operates over 5,000 virtual machines on 350 physical servers, supporting a wide range of systems including delivery logistics, inventory management, and enterprise resource planning. To meet its demanding uptime requirements, the company selected SIOS LifeKeeper for its exceptional reliability, simplicity, and ability to support both off-the-shelf and custom services within a Linux-based enterprise infrastructure.

More than 20 years ago, the EGGER IT team began its search for an HA solution that could scale with its growing global footprint while minimizing system complexity. After evaluating several alternatives, including open source and traditional clustering tools, the team chose SIOS LifeKeeper. The solution provided seamless support for complex database environments, including SAP HANA, Oracle, and customized PostgreSQL, as other internal services.

A critical advantage was the SIOS Application Recovery Kit (ARK), which enabled EGGER to tailor HA protection for its custom applications and services. Combined with a user-friendly GUI and powerful command-line capabilities, SIOS LifeKeeper has allowed EGGER to simplify configuration, reduce setup errors, and streamline management across two-node clusters in its virtualized environment.

With SIOS, EGGER has not only reduced downtime risk but also gained the ability to perform maintenance and upgrades without taking systems offline. The company continues to evolve its infrastructure strategy, with SIOS LifeKeeper remaining a key pillar in its ongoing innovation.

SIOS Technology Corp today announced a new distribution agreement with Climb Channel Solutions, an international specialty technology distributor and wholly owned subsidiary of Climb Global Solutions, Inc. This partnership will enable Climb to distribute SIOS DataKeeper and SIOS LifeKeeper products to its extensive network of reseller partners across the Americas region.

SIOS delivers innovative high availability and disaster recovery solutions that protect critical applications from downtime and data loss. SIOS LifeKeeper provides automated failover clustering, ensuring continuous operation of essential applications, while SIOS DataKeeper offers real-time replication for high availability and disaster recovery in both cloud and on-premises environments. Together, these solutions help businesses maintain uptime, safeguard data integrity, and achieve seamless business continuity.

For more information about SIOS Technology and its high availability solutions, visit www.us.sios.com. To learn more about Climb Channel Solutions, visit www.ClimbCS.com.

SIOS Technology Corp today announced it will demonstrate its high availability clustering software for business-critical applications at four leading technology events this spring. SIOS also announced that it is inviting all IT practitioners to participate in its newly launched 2025 HA/DR Practices Survey, designed to gather insights into current trends, challenges, and strategies for ensuring application uptime and data protection.

• Milestone Technology Day 2025 Benelux – May 8, 2025 – Eindhoven-Best, Netherlands
• Red Hat Summit – May 19–22, 2025, Boston, MA – Booth #854
• Milestone XPerience Day – June 4, 2025, London, UK
• SQLBits 2025 – June 18–21, 2025, ExCeL London, UK

At each event, SIOS experts will demonstrate how SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper software provide high availability and disaster recovery for critical applications like SQL Server, SAP, and Oracle. Attendees will learn how SIOS clustering software ensures application uptime, eliminates data loss, and simplifies HA/DR across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments.

SIOS clustering software enables IT teams to create highly available application environments without the need for shared storage. Through intelligent application monitoring, real-time data replication, and automated failover and recovery, SIOS ensures business continuity with minimal complexity and reduced cost. With support for Windows and Linux in any infrastructure, SIOS solutions are trusted by enterprises worldwide to protect mission-critical operations.

SIOS Launches Survey to Gather Insights on HA/DR Practices

As part of its commitment to advancing resilience strategies in the enterprise, SIOS is launching its 2025 HA/DR Practices Survey to collect insights into the challenges, priorities, and real-world strategies used by IT professionals to ensure application uptime and data protection. The results will be compiled into the SIOS 2025 State of High Availability and Disaster Recovery Report, providing valuable benchmarks for the industry.

All practitioners, including attendees of the Red Hat Summit, Milestone Technology Day, Milestone XPerience Day, and SQLBits, are invited to participate in the survey here.

Here are some 2025 Predictions by Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology. This is what they see coming down the pipeline for 2025.

Real-Time Failover for AI-Powered Security Analytics – As AI-driven security analytics tools become standard for detecting and responding to threats, organizations will prioritize high availability to ensure these applications operate without downtime. Failover clustering will play a crucial role in maintaining continuous, real-time threat detection and response, preventing gaps in security coverage that could leave the enterprise vulnerable. By leveraging failover clustering, enterprises will mitigate risks and enable uninterrupted operation of their critical security monitoring and analytics tools.

Greater Adoption of Hybrid Cloud Failover Clustering – Enterprises will increasingly implement hybrid cloud architectures, combining on-premises data centers with public cloud platforms for failover clustering. This setup will ensure high availability and disaster recovery while offering flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Organizations will prioritize failover solutions that seamlessly bridge on-prem and cloud environments, allowing IT teams to leverage the cloud’s resilience without abandoning existing infrastructure.

Focus on Simplified, IT Generalist-Friendly Solutions – Many enterprises will invest in failover clustering solutions that are easier to manage, targeting the growing need for solutions that can be operated by IT generalists, not just clustering experts. With automation, simplified interfaces, and streamlined deployment, these clustering solutions will allow organizations to maintain high availability without the complexity typically associated with failover clustering—appealing particularly to small and medium-sized businesses looking to achieve enterprise-grade resilience.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Takes Center Stage in Enterprise IT – Enterprises will increasingly migrate critical applications to hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) to simplify management, cut costs, and enable dynamic scaling. HCI consolidates storage, compute, and networking, reducing the complexity of traditional systems. As IT leaders prioritize agility and resilience, HCI’s automation and reliability will present a strong alternative to traditional setups. This trend also aligns with growing demands for hybrid and multi-cloud flexibility, as HCI integrates seamlessly with public cloud providers.

Increased Reliance on Cross-Region, Multi-Cloud Failover Clustering – To achieve stronger resilience against regional outages, enterprises will adopt cross-region and multi-cloud failover clustering strategies. These setups will allow critical applications to failover seamlessly across different cloud regions or cloud providers, ensuring continuity even in cases of large-scale disruptions. This trend will drive demand for clustering solutions capable of handling complex, geographically distributed infrastructures and automating failover processes across subnets and cloud regions with minimal manual intervention.

High Availability for Zero Trust Security Architectures – With enterprises continuing to adopt Zero Trust architectures, there will be a growing emphasis on ensuring that security applications supporting Zero Trust (e.g., identity and access management, endpoint protection, and authentication systems) remain highly available. Failover clustering will become essential for these applications to operate without interruption, allowing enterprises to enforce continuous security measures and authentication processes even during maintenance or unexpected system issues.

Always-On Monitoring: The Future of Automated High Availability Clustering for APM – High availability (HA) clustering with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools will become more streamlined and automated, making it easier to maintain continuous monitoring without disruptions. HA clustering solutions will feature improved integration with APM platforms, offering seamless failover, predictive analytics for proactive issue resolution, and reduced setup complexity. Users can expect more self-healing capabilities, where clusters can detect and address performance issues automatically, minimizing manual intervention and ensuring that critical monitoring remains active around the clock.