By In today’s enterprise environments, high availability (HA) is a must-have for mission-critical systems — but delivering it is far from simple. Application and infrastructure teams often have fundamentally different goals, and unless those goals are aligned, resilience efforts can easily break down.
In this TFiR interview, Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, shares how organizations can balance performance with efficiency — and avoid costly downtime in the process.
The Uptime vs. TCO Dilemma
“Application teams are responsible for keeping critical systems like Oracle, SAP HANA, or SQL Server up and running,” Hoagland explained. These teams are laser-focused on uptime and automation — because when things go down, they’re the ones fielding angry calls from business users.
In contrast, infrastructure teams prioritize total cost of ownership (TCO), operational efficiency, and deployment consistency. Their goal is to minimize waste, standardize environments, and avoid any configuration that adds cost or complexity.
The result? Even though both groups are working toward what’s best for the business, their objectives can conflict — especially during HA planning.
Where Friction Emerges
According to Hoagland, friction typically arises when app owners push for customized, high-performance solutions while infrastructure teams resist anything that deviates from a standardized, cost-efficient deployment.
“Application teams want a failover that’s automated and fast. Infra teams want deployments that are consistent across Windows and Linux, without needing specialized skills or custom training,” she noted.
This divergence becomes especially visible during disaster recovery planning or when evaluating HA tools — where features like manual failover or extensive scripting can become sticking points for one or both groups.
The Case for Cross-Team Alignment
To bridge this divide, Hoagland recommends an upfront exercise: quantify the real cost of downtime.
“Walk through what happens if a key system goes down for an hour. Who’s impacted? What’s the manual effort required to recover? What’s the business cost of that lost time?” she said. These kinds of discussions bring clarity — and help both teams align around shared priorities instead of competing silos.
She also emphasizes the importance of choosing HA solutions that serve both sets of needs: those that are highly available and easy to standardize.
Choosing the Right HA Solution: What to Look For
Hoagland outlined three key criteria for selecting a high availability tool that minimizes friction:
- Cross-Platform Consistency
Can the same HA solution work across both Windows and Linux? If so, it reduces training needs, simplifies deployment, and supports the infrastructure team’s goal of uniformity. - Automated Failover
Many HA solutions still require manual intervention. “Application teams don’t want to wait around for IT to restore a service. They want confidence that failover will happen immediately and automatically,” she said. - Ease of Use
Solutions that require extensive scripting or niche expertise may be rejected by either team — for being too fragile, too expensive, or too hard to maintain. Usability should never be an afterthought.
Ultimately, the right HA platform should deliver performance and uptime without burdening either team with unnecessary complexity.
Designing for Resilience and Alignment
As enterprise systems grow more interconnected — and as the cost of failure increases — bridging the gap between app and infra teams is essential. The stakes are too high to treat high availability as a side task or single-team responsibility.
“The real success comes from alignment,” said Hoagland. “When both teams work together on the same problem, they can find solutions that reduce risk, lower cost, and keep systems running.”
