Swapnil Bhartiya: You might think that migrating to the cloud automatically solves all your problem. It gives you high availability, but in reality it introduces new points of failure. Why? Because teams often mistakenly treat high availability as a one time setup. But in reality it’s a balancing act that if neglected, can lead to costly downtime. It is recommended that failover strategy should evolve alongside changing environments. And today we have with us once again Matthew Pollard, Customer experience Software Engineer at SAISS Technology to uncover the top five high availability mistakes that persist even in 2026 and how to steer clear of them. Matthew, it’s great to have you back.

Matthew Pollard: Thank you for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: It’s my pleasure. Can you explain why simply moving to the cloud doesn’t solve or guarantee high availability?

Matthew Pollard: What a lot of organizations seem to think is once they get into the cloud, they inherit some kind of high availability protection for everything. And to a certain degree you do, because you get redundancy and reliability around a lot of the cloud managed infrastructure components. But it wholly neglects everything inside the systems, your applications and other components in the systems that do need a specific high availability solution set up to protect them, to provide redundancy and failover capabilities.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about why do teams still treat high availability as a one time setup instead of a continuous process? I mean, we have seen this in security space, right? It used to be hey security, you did it once. It’s someone else’s problem. But things are changing and I feel that just the way we have the whole DevSecOps movement with high availability also it cannot be treated as someone else’s problem or something. You said it opens and forget about it.

Matthew Pollard: Yeah, and we certainly do observe organizations treating high availability as this type of set it and forget it type of component in your environment. But environments are complicated in the modern day. They are evolving constantly. New things being added, things being taken away, reshuffled, reorganized, and every one of those, as much as it can impact your applications, your databases, your systems, your high availability solution is something in that stack that does need to be proactively maintained, planned around and included in, for example your patching and your maintenance procedures. Otherwise you might pull something out from under it, you might add something in that it’s not accounting for. And then when you have some kind of issue, it’s not set up to be prepared to handle that. And now you’re finding out about that problem when you need high availability solutions to be doing their job.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So very well said. Thank you. Can you talk about what are some common application level dependencies that are Often overlooked in in ha strategies.

Matthew Pollard: Yeah. So once you get inside the systems at the level of the applications, the databases, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just thinking that once those services can fail over, it can be moved between systems. You have high availability, but all of those depend on other things, on the systems, they depend on storage. If you’re focused on your applications and you neglect the external databases that they rely on, if you neglect the networking components like your virtual IPs, your load balancers, then even if the application fails over, if it doesn’t have the storage that it depends on to function properly, if it doesn’t have the networking components that is required for clients to actually connect to the application, then you’ve still incurred a downtime regardless of if the application moved or not, because it’s not functioning properly.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Is it possible for you to share some examples where because of lack of real world failure testing, it led to kind of unexpected outages?

Matthew Pollard: Yeah, of course. And I see that as another symptom of the set it and forget it mindset we mentioned earlier. But I’ve definitely observed many instances where organizations have set up everything, followed the documentation, followed their internal runbooks. On paper it’s perfect. But for example, the runbook was written a while back or the documentation wasn’t what covered you, all of your specific needs. And because you never tested an actual robust failover procedure where you try to, for example, simulate an actual outage that would cause a failover, there are holes under there that you were not aware of. And then once the actual failover happens, that’s when you’re finding out about it, which is when again you need it to be working the most. Real world does not often follow those ideal on paper scenarios.

Swapnil Bhartiya: These days, organizations are also becoming very, very cost, kind of constant cost conscious as well. But at the same time, performance and high availability is also becoming a critical talking point. How can organizations find the right balance between cost and performance in their strategies?

Matthew Pollard: Yeah, it can certainly be difficult. And it’s different for everyone because like you said, it’s this balancing act because you can throw everything you have, everything you possibly can afford to, at least your solution, your strategy. But what results from that is often over engineered. It’s overly complex, which makes it very hard to maintain or change or upkeep. And like you said, the cost is becoming a greater factor every day. So anything overly expensive becomes a problem. But if you overcorrect for that and you go too little, any money that you save by not putting it into the High availability strategy, the solution you’re going to spend anyway in losses when you incur a downtime because it’s not robust enough to cover all of your needs. So what you have to do is take a real thorough investigation into your options of solutions, providers, partners, strategies, configurations. Once you’ve chosen your HA solution or partner provider strategy to make sure that it is actually covering all of your needs and that you have to get configured to cover all of your needs but without breaking the bank.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What steps can IT admins take to ensure that failover strategies keep up with changing environments that we just discussed?

Matthew Pollard: So what I would say is the steps you take to keep up with it is just testing, updating, Stay in contact with your partners, your providers for your HA solutions to make sure that you have the newest releases, that you’re aware of, any issues that might affect you and how to work around or remediate them. Any patches you need to apply, make sure that you’re applying best practices as recommended by the provider for your applications, for your HA solutions, for your databases, and again, just back to the test it because once you’ve done all of that, you need to make sure that you’re actually covering your needs. You need to go in and block your networks, you need to cut power to your systems and make sure that the standbys can detect it, they can bring everything in service and make sure that your clients can actually connect to it. Anything external that depends on it can still function in that scenario.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Of course I’m talking to you. So I would also love to know, how does sios technology approach these common high ability challenges that we just talked about to make life easier for IT admins?

Matthew Pollard: Right? So the number one priority is always communication. It’s always getting in touch with our partners, with our users and making sure that what they’ve configured is actually meeting their needs. It’s following up after they’ve noticed some kind of issue and saying, have you remediated it? Have you taken these steps that we’ve identified to make sure won’t happen again? Is there any way we can help you make sure that your solution is meeting your needs? Any testing? Do you need us to come in and check your systems? We offer all kinds of services to help customers identify any problems and remediate them before they actually cause any issues. So I would say that if I had to sum up our strategy, it’s just being proactive, open and communicative with our base.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Are there any emerging trends in HA space that organizations should be aware of in 2026.

Matthew Pollard: I think that especially with some of the high profile issues that have happened recently, not just HA, but security, it’s always been a huge concern and it’s become an even bigger concern. Cybersecurity is commonly referred to as a type of arms race where it’s always escalating, always improving, both on the attacker and the defender side. And one thing that we’ve been noticing more and more is teams dealing with security, teams dealing with infrastructure, not always communicating enough to understand the impacts of the changes that they’re making. And I would even say that to take that to a more general view. As environments are getting more complex, it’s becoming more common for there to be dedicated teams for each different type of component. A networking team, a database team, an operating system team, an application team, a security team, a cloud team, an infrastructure team. And making sure that all of your teams are communicating with each other, even when that can be complex or hard to set up, is very important, or at the very least that your HA team has lines to communicate with all of those. Because we’ve talked about before, high availability is such a complicated type of environment when it has to cover all of these different components, the application dependencies, the application, the infrastructure. So a trend I would say I’ve been seeing emerge is the compartmentalization of teams and team responsibilities within an environment. And it arises the need for clear communication between those teams. Especially when you have a high availability solution that’s monitoring everything and managing everything.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And finally, what advice would you give to IT admins looking to strengthen their Azure setup?

Matthew Pollard: If you’re looking to strengthen your HA setup, I would say go through and really make sure that everything your users need, everything your teams need is being protected. I’m going to say it again because it’s just so important. Test, test, test, test, test it all. Test it as realistically as you can. If you’re setting up some kind of QA or pre production environment, then make sure that that is as similar as it can be to the production environment, because that’s how you get the most credibility out of your testing. And be proactive with your planning. Make sure that when you have to update, when you have to patch, that everything is considered as a nature of a HA solution, having to manage all these different components. If your patching causes the HA solution to trigger, you know, a failover or some kind of alert when it shouldn’t, that can affect the components that you’re patching as well. Check with your vendors to make sure that you’re following their appropriate and recommended steps. It’s just it requires you to be very thorough. So that’s probably the best advice that I can give. Be thorough and be proactive.