Enterprises are investing heavily in high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), yet downtime remains a persistent problem as IT environments become more distributed. SIOS Technology Corp.’s 2026 State of Application Resilience Survey suggests that hybrid infrastructure, inconsistent recovery testing and operational complexity are exposing gaps in traditional approaches to application resilience.

The survey, based on responses from more than 250 IT leaders across North America and the United Kingdom, found that 76% of organizations experienced at least one outage lasting longer than 10 minutes during the past year, despite having HA/DR protections in place. The findings point to a widening gap between having resilience technologies deployed and being confident that critical applications can actually withstand disruptions.

For enterprises running healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, government and other business-critical workloads, the distinction is significant. An HA or DR system may provide failover capabilities, but maintaining application availability across increasingly heterogeneous infrastructure requires more than simply moving workloads when something fails.

Hybrid infrastructure is adding to the resilience challenge

The survey reflects the continued shift toward hybrid and multicloud architectures. Nearly seven in 10 respondents said they operate critical applications across hybrid environments, while just 2% reported operating exclusively on-premises.

That architectural diversity creates additional challenges for IT teams responsible for application availability. Windows continues to be the leading operating system for mission-critical applications, but organizations are increasingly operating mixed Windows and Linux environments. Supporting these environments can require different tools, configurations and operational processes, increasing the burden on infrastructure and application teams.

That complexity has now emerged as the leading HA/DR challenge, ranking ahead of cost. Integration across heterogeneous environments was also identified as a major concern.

The result is a resilience problem that is increasingly operational as much as technological. Enterprises may have HA clustering, backup and DR products in place, but maintaining consistent protection across platforms and environments can become difficult as infrastructure expands.

Confidence in existing strategies also appears limited. Only around half of respondents expressed satisfaction with their current HA/DR solutions, indicating that many organizations see room for improvement even after making significant investments.

Recovery testing and cybersecurity move higher on the agenda

Testing is another weak point. Only 7% of organizations conduct DR testing monthly, while one-third test annually. More concerning, 22% of respondents did not know how frequently their organization performs DR tests.

For IT leaders, this creates a potentially costly uncertainty: a recovery strategy may exist on paper without sufficient evidence that applications, dependencies and infrastructure will recover as expected during an actual incident.

Cybersecurity is further changing how organizations think about HA. Seventy-two percent of respondents either already use or would consider using HA clustering to simplify patch management. This reflects a broader convergence between availability and cyber resilience, where organizations need to apply security updates without creating unnecessary service interruptions.

DR also remains a major investment priority. Improving disaster recovery protection ranked second only to cybersecurity among planned IT investments over the next 18 months.

SIOS argues that these trends are pushing enterprises toward more application-aware approaches to resilience, particularly technologies capable of operating across mixed environments while simplifying management and maintenance. The company’s focus is on application high availability and disaster recovery for heterogeneous infrastructure.

The larger takeaway is that enterprise resilience is moving beyond traditional failover. As AI workloads, cloud native applications, Kubernetes environments and multicloud deployments add further layers of complexity, organizations will increasingly need to demonstrate not just that recovery technology exists, but that critical applications can remain available, secure and recoverable under real-world conditions.