When high availability (HA) projects falter, it’s often not because of poor technology — it’s because of misaligned priorities between teams. That’s the insight Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, shares in this TFiR interview, where she dives into the friction that arises during the design and rollout of HA clusters.

Application owners are laser-focused on uptime. Whether it’s SAP, Oracle, or SQL Server, these teams are responsible for keeping business-critical applications online. That means minimizing dependencies, automating failovers, and ensuring fast recovery without waiting on other teams.

“They’re the ones who get the angry phone calls when systems go down,” Hoagland notes. For them, high availability means zero tolerance for downtime — and zero reliance on manual intervention.

On the other side, infrastructure teams are driven by total cost of ownership (TCO). Their mandate is to optimize spend, standardize environments, and avoid special configurations that require custom processes or training.

“Every penny they spend has to return dividends,” Hoagland explains. That translates into uniform deployment practices and streamlined architectures — even if it means resisting special cases for HA.

This clash becomes most visible during HA rollouts. App teams want autonomy and agility; infra teams want efficiency and predictability. Without mutual understanding, the result is gridlock — or worse, a brittle system that satisfies no one.

The solution, Hoagland suggests, lies in early collaboration and shared priorities. App and infra teams need to engage before the rollout — not after requirements are locked. A joint definition of high availability, shared SLAs, and aligned metrics can go a long way in avoiding conflict.

Technical tools also matter. Platforms that support automated failover within standardized environments help bridge the divide. But no tool can substitute for empathy and communication between teams.

Ultimately, organizations that succeed with HA aren’t just building clusters — they’re building cross-functional trust.

For enterprise leaders, understanding the people dynamics of HA planning may be the difference between a resilient architecture and an expensive failure.