By Guest: Margaret Hoagland
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: Mission Critical
Topic: High Availability
High availability management is facing a skills crisis—not because expertise doesn’t exist, but because the work has shifted to generalist IT staff who were not trained as HA specialists. SIOS Technology is addressing this reality head-on with LifeKeeper v10’s admin-centric approach, which empowers non-experts to manage mission-critical workloads effectively.
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The Complexity Problem
Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, describes the fundamental challenge facing organizations today. “The nature of high availability is that it touches the entire IT infrastructure,” she explains. “For your application to run, you need to have the network, the storage, the operating system, the hardware, software—everything in between—to be operational, functional, and compatible.”
This isn’t a single-silo problem. High availability requires coordination across the entire infrastructure stack. When any component fails—network connectivity, storage performance, OS stability, or hardware reliability—the HA system must detect the issue and execute failover to maintain application availability.
“That’s across a lot of silos, and that’s a fairly complex undertaking,” Hoagland notes. Traditionally, organizations assigned dedicated HA specialists or infrastructure architects to design, implement, and manage these systems.
The Shift to Generalist Staff
That model is breaking down. “The work to keep those IT applications up and running has now pushed down to more junior staff, or more generalist staff, who are trying to make sure that all of the elements necessary to keep the application running are functional,” Hoagland says.
This shift reflects broader changes in IT operations. Organizations are consolidating teams, pushing more responsibility onto fewer people, and expecting IT generalists to manage increasingly complex infrastructure. The alternative—hiring HA specialists for every organization running mission-critical workloads—doesn’t scale economically or practically.
“That’s a lot to ask,” Hoagland acknowledges. Generalist IT staff must now understand failover triggers, resource dependencies, cluster health, and recovery procedures across diverse infrastructure components—all while managing their other responsibilities.
The Admin-Centric Solution
SIOS’s response is admin-centric HA: building systems that make expertise accessible rather than requiring it. “We are experts in high availability. We are automating many tasks. We are adding control. We’re adding observability,” Hoagland explains.
Automation reduces the burden on IT staff by handling routine tasks and complex decision-making that would otherwise require deep expertise. When infrastructure issues arise, the system responds automatically according to best practices embedded in the software.
Control gives admins the ability to influence HA behavior without understanding every technical detail. They can configure policies, set priorities, and define failover rules using interfaces designed for clarity rather than assuming specialized knowledge.
Observability may be the most critical element. “We are working toward a system that allows people who are not HA experts to manage systems effectively—to avoid downtime where possible and to understand the causes of failover when it happens,” Hoagland says.
Learning from Failover Events
When failover occurs and operations continue seamlessly, that’s HA working as designed. But generalist admins need more than successful failover—they need to understand why it happened. Was it a hardware failure? A network timeout? A software crash? Resource exhaustion?
SIOS LifeKeeper v10 provides this visibility so admins can “ensure a reliable application experience” by addressing root causes, not just reacting to symptoms. An admin who understands that failover occurred due to network latency spikes can work with network teams to investigate and prevent recurrence. Without that observability, they’re managing blindly.
Why This Matters Now
The admin-centric approach reflects how IT operations actually work in 2025. Organizations can’t afford to staff every environment with HA specialists. They need tools that elevate generalist staff capabilities through intelligent automation and clear visibility.
This benefits both IT teams and organizations. Admins gain confidence managing complex systems without overwhelming training requirements. Organizations achieve reliable high availability without prohibitive staffing costs.
SIOS has 25 years of HA expertise to draw from. Rather than keeping that expertise locked inside specialist-only tools, LifeKeeper v10 embeds it in automation, makes it accessible through intuitive controls, and explains it through observability features that turn every failover into a learning opportunity.
For organizations pushing HA management responsibility to generalist IT staff—which is most organizations today—SIOS’s admin-centric approach offers a sustainable path forward.
