SIOS Technology has been named one of the 2026 Best Places to Work in South Carolina, marking the seventh consecutive year the company has received the recognition. The award highlights SIOS’ workplace culture and employee experience while also underscoring the company’s long-standing presence in Columbia’s technology and engineering community.

The annual program is organized by SC Biz News in partnership with BridgeTower Media and Best Companies Group. Winners were recognized at an event on August 24 at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

Employee Experience at the Center of the Evaluation

The Best Places to Work program evaluates participating organizations through two components: an employer questionnaire and a confidential employee engagement survey. The assessment considers factors including workplace culture, benefits, leadership, and employee satisfaction.

For SIOS, the recognition comes as the company continues to maintain its research, engineering, professional services, and support operations in Columbia. Its R&D activities are based at the M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center at the University of South Carolina’s College of Engineering and Computing.

The location also reflects SIOS’ broader relationship with the university. The company maintains campus partnerships and works with the university’s Computer Science Department, while its employees participate in initiatives within the Columbia community.

Nobuo Kita, chairman, president and CEO of SIOS Technology, attributed the continued recognition to the company’s employees and their focus on collaboration and innovation. He also pointed to SIOS’ connection to Columbia and its contribution to the region’s technology and engineering ecosystem.

The recognition comes at a time when technology companies are competing not only for customers but also for specialized engineering and software talent. For organizations developing infrastructure software, maintaining a strong engineering workforce can directly influence product development, customer support, and the ability to respond to rapidly changing technology requirements.

Building a Local Technology Presence

Suzanne Fischer-Huettner, Managing Director of BridgeTower Media/SCBIZ, said this year’s recognized employers demonstrate a focus on employee well-being alongside business performance.

SIOS’ Columbia operations are closely tied to its work in enterprise infrastructure resilience. The company develops high availability and disaster recovery software for Windows and Linux environments, protecting applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, and Oracle across data centers, cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments.

That focus on resilience extends to increasingly distributed enterprise environments, where downtime can have consequences across applications and business operations. As organizations adopt multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, maintaining availability across diverse infrastructure has become more complex, increasing demand for technologies that can automate failover and recovery.

While the Best Places to Work recognition is primarily focused on the employee experience, SIOS’ continued presence in South Carolina also highlights the role regional technology hubs can play in supporting enterprise software development.

For SIOS, the seventh consecutive recognition provides another measure of its ability to retain an established presence in Columbia while continuing to develop infrastructure technologies for global customers. The company’s ongoing partnership with the University of South Carolina could also help strengthen the local pipeline of engineering and technology talent as enterprise IT becomes increasingly dependent on specialized skills in cloud, Linux, Windows, and application resilience.