For IT teams running mission-critical applications in the cloud, choosing the right high availability solution beyond what the cloud provider offers is a critical decision. Get it wrong, and you’re facing extended downtime, manual recovery procedures, and business disruption when you can least afford it.

Philip Merry, Solutions Engineer at SIOS Technology, offers practical guidance on what to evaluate when assessing HA solutions—and why the best tools deliver both ease of use and deep application awareness.

“The advice I would give to any IT teams looking is consider not only the ease of use of your high availability solution,” Merry says. “Consider that when you really need to interact with your high availability solution, it’s either going to be in a situation of downtime, a situation where you’re performing maintenance or updates, but one way or another, it’s going to be at a time where things need to operate smoothly.”

This is the critical context for HA tool evaluation: you don’t use these tools during normal operations. You use them when things have gone wrong or when you’re making changes that could cause problems. In those moments, complexity is your enemy.

“You don’t want any unexpected issues, errors to occur,” Merry explains. “And you also want to make sure that it’s an easy element of your process for whatever you’re doing, whether it’s maintenance or whether it’s working to recover from an outage.”

Ease of use during crisis moments means clear interfaces, predictable behavior, and minimal steps between detection and resolution. It means administrators can execute failover or recovery procedures without consulting documentation or second-guessing commands. In a downtime scenario, every minute counts—and friction in your HA tool extends that downtime.

“So the first element I would recommend is look for that ease of use,” Merry says.

But ease of use alone isn’t sufficient. An HA tool that’s simple to operate but lacks depth will fail you when it matters most—not by being hard to use, but by doing the wrong thing smoothly.

“The other element, which may sound contradictory, but I really believe that they can go hand in hand, is that deep application awareness of your high availability tool,” Merry explains.

Application awareness is what ensures that when your HA tool says “application is running,” it means the application is fully operational—not just that a process has started. It’s the difference between a database that’s running and a database that’s serving queries with correct data, accessible to clients, and integrated with its ERP layer.

“Make sure that it’s not just checking the box of starting the application, but making sure that it starts the application with all of its dependencies already met,” Merry says. “So that when your high availability tool says your applications are running, you can be assured that not only are your applications running, but they’re running at full capacity where they are available and serving the purpose required for the business.”

This is the key distinction: running versus running at full capacity. An application can technically be running while being completely useless to the business because its dependencies aren’t met, its data isn’t current, or its network configuration is wrong.

Deep application awareness means the HA solution understands what “fully operational” means for each specific application—and won’t report success until that state is achieved. It means orchestrating prerequisites, verifying data consistency, configuring networking, and ensuring the entire dependency chain is satisfied.

These two requirements—ease of use and deep application awareness—might seem contradictory. Complex functionality usually comes with complex interfaces. But Merry argues they’re not just compatible, but complementary.

The best HA solutions abstract complexity through intelligent automation. They make the complex task of orchestrating dependencies and ensuring full operational readiness simple from the administrator’s perspective. You get deep application awareness without the operational burden of managing it manually.

For IT teams evaluating HA solutions beyond cloud provider offerings, the criteria are clear: look for tools that are easy to use during the high-stress moments when you need them, and that have the deep application awareness to ensure applications don’t just restart, but recover to full operational capacity.

Anything less leaves you vulnerable to the very downtime you’re trying to prevent.