Guest: Margaret Hoagland
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: 2026 Predictions
Topic: High Availability

The era of simple, single-cloud IT infrastructure is over. As enterprises adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, IT admins face unprecedented complexity—managing applications they can’t see and environments they didn’t design. Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, predicts that Observability will become non-negotiable in 2026, while high availability clustering evolves from a disaster recovery tool into a critical component of cybersecurity strategy.

Observability Becomes Essential for Complex IT Environments

IT infrastructure has never been more complicated. Organizations are running critical applications across public clouds, on-premises data centers, and virtualized environments—often simultaneously. This complexity creates a dangerous disconnect between IT architects who design systems and IT admins who operate them daily.

“Cloud hypervisors and virtualization separate IT admins from the information they need to understand application health, troubleshoot problems, and fine-tune and optimize application environments,” Hoagland explains. “We think there is a much bigger need for observability across IT infrastructure.”

SIOS Technology, which specializes in high availability software for critical applications like Microsoft SQL Server, SAP, and SAP HANA, sees this challenge firsthand. Their software monitors entire environments and automatically fails over to secondary servers when problems are detected—but admins still need visibility into what caused the failover and how to prevent future incidents.

Multi-Cloud Strategies Gain Momentum After Major Outages

The conversation around multi-cloud has shifted from theoretical best practice to operational necessity. After significant cloud outages in recent years exposed the risk of putting all infrastructure eggs in one basket, enterprises are demanding cross-cloud failover capabilities.

“There was an outage earlier this year that really made everyone sit up and ask, ‘Is putting everything in one cloud sufficient, or do I need a second cloud to fail over to?’” Hoagland notes. SIOS is one of the few vendors that enables failover from one cloud to another—a capability that’s becoming increasingly critical.

Companies are also adopting cloud-specific strategies, running different applications in different clouds to optimize for performance, cost, or feature sets. This adds layers of complexity but delivers real IT efficiencies when managed properly.

High Availability and Cybersecurity Converge

Perhaps the most surprising prediction is the blending of traditionally separate IT silos—specifically, high availability and cybersecurity. HA environments are proving invaluable for security teams that need to test and apply patches without risking downtime.

“Because high-availability environments allow companies to test and apply patches while ensuring application security in a highly efficient manner with nearly zero downtime, HA is becoming a critical part of a cybersecurity strategy,” Hoagland says.

The technique is straightforward but powerful: teams can test patches offline in a realistic environment, then perform rolling upgrades by failing over to the patched system. It’s a surprisingly new application of established technology that fills a critical gap in modern security operations.

The IT Admin Challenge: Complexity Without Context

As organizations separate the roles of IT architects and IT admins for efficiency, a knowledge gap emerges. Architects design and validate systems, then hand them off to admins for daily operation. When a failover happens at 2 AM, those admins need more than error logs—they need deep Observability and expert support.

“The IT admins are typically not well equipped to solve that problem,” Hoagland acknowledges. This is driving SIOS to refine its products around the actual day-in-the-life experience of IT admins. The company recently launched the latest version of LifeKeeper with a unified management console for both Windows and Linux environments.

“IT teams operating in complex environments don’t want to be retrained, and it’s expensive to retrain for different operating systems,” Hoagland explains. The consistent user experience reduces training costs and operational friction.

What CIOs Should Do Now

For technical leaders preparing for 2026, Hoagland recommends understanding the total cost of ownership—not just licensing costs—and the real-world experience of IT admins managing complex environments. She also emphasizes the importance of vendor expertise: “Are they going to get someone who has been specializing in high availability for many years and can truly help them build a healthy, reliable application environment?”

The opportunity is clear: enterprises can implement more flexible architectures, confidently run SAP or other critical systems in any cloud, and adopt security practices that don’t sacrifice availability. But success requires Observability tools, multi-cloud HA strategies, and vendors who understand the operational realities of modern IT.

As hybrid and multi-cloud become the default rather than the exception, the organizations that invest in Observability and cross-cloud resilience now will avoid the painful lessons their competitors learn through downtime in 2026.