By High availability environments span every layer of the stack: applications, dependencies, networking, storage, operating systems, and cloud. When the teams responsible for each of those layers stop communicating, HA solutions are left monitoring an environment that no single team fully understands. Security changes made without infrastructure awareness, or infrastructure changes made without HA awareness, create failure scenarios that no clustering software can anticipate on its own.
In this interview on TFiR, Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, walks through how team compartmentalization has become an emerging operational risk for high availability in 2026, and what organizations need to do to close the communication gap.
Guest: Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology
Show: TFiR
Here is what every infrastructure engineer and HA architect needs to know.
Technical Deep Dive
Q: What emerging trends in high availability should organizations be aware of in 2026?
Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, identifies two converging trends: the escalating intersection of cybersecurity and high availability, and the increasing compartmentalization of infrastructure teams. High-profile incidents have elevated security as a top concern across all infrastructure disciplines, not just dedicated security functions. At the same time, environments have grown complex enough that organizations now maintain separate teams for networking, databases, operating systems, applications, security, cloud, and infrastructure, each operating with limited visibility into what the others are doing.
“Cybersecurity is commonly referred to as a type of arms race where it’s always escalating, always improving, both on the attacker and the defender side.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: How does team compartmentalization create risk for high availability environments?
When teams are segmented by function, changes made by one team, such as a security configuration update or a network policy change, can have unintended consequences for the HA layer without anyone realizing it. Pollard notes that security teams and infrastructure teams in particular are not always communicating enough to understand the impact of the changes they are making. Because HA solutions must monitor and manage across application dependencies, the application itself, and the underlying infrastructure, any change in any of those layers is relevant to HA stability.
“Teams dealing with security, teams dealing with infrastructure, not always communicating enough to understand the impacts of the changes that they’re making.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: What should a high availability team do when operating in a fragmented multi-team environment?
Pollard recommends that the HA team maintain active communication lines with every other operational team in the organization. Even when establishing those lines of communication is complex or difficult to coordinate, the HA solution’s role of monitoring everything and managing everything across the environment makes cross-team visibility a functional requirement, not a best practice. At minimum, the HA team needs visibility into changes being made by security, networking, database, cloud, and application teams before those changes reach production.
“Making sure that all of your teams are communicating with each other, even when that can be complex or hard to set up, is very important, or at the very least, that your HA team has lines to communicate with all of those.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Resources & Documentation
- SIOS Technology, provider of high availability and disaster recovery software for complex enterprise environments
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👇 Click to Read Full Raw Transcript
Swapnil Bhartiya: Are there any emerging trends in HA space that organizations should be aware of in 2026?
Matthew Pollard: I think that especially with some of the high profile issues that have happened recently, not just HA, but security is. It’s always been a huge concern and it’s become an even bigger concern. Cybersecurity is, you know, commonly referred to as a type of arms race where it’s always escalating, always improving, both on the attacker and the defender side. And one thing that we’ve been noticing more and more is teams dealing with security, teams dealing with infrastructure, not always communicating enough to understand the impacts of the changes that they’re making. And I would even say that to take that to a more general view. As environments are getting more complex, it’s becoming more common for there to be dedicated teams for each different type of component. A networking team, a database team, an operating system team, an application team, a security team, a cloud team, an infrastructure team. And making sure that all of your teams are communicating with each other, even when that can be complex or hard to set up, is very important, or at the very least, that your HA team has lines to communicate with all of those. Because we’ve talked about before, high availability is such a complicated type of environment when it has to cover all of these different components, the application dependencies, the application, the infrastructure. So a trend I would say I’ve been seeing emerge is the compartmentalization of teams and team responsibilities within an environment. And it arises the need for clear communication between those teams, especially when you have a high availability solution that’s monitoring everything and managing everything.
