When it comes to keeping enterprise systems up and running, application teams and infrastructure teams are often at odds. Despite working toward the same company goals, their priorities can be surprisingly misaligned — especially around high availability (HA) for mission-critical systems. In this TFiR interview, Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, highlights this divide and offers a path forward for better collaboration.

Application teams are typically on the front lines, responsible for ensuring that essential platforms like Oracle, SAP HANA, and SQL Server remain operational 24/7. They’re the ones who answer the angry phone calls when something goes down — and their top priority is uptime and performance.

“Infrastructure teams, on the other hand, are all about TCO, cost savings, and efficiency,” Hoagland explains. Their mandate is to reduce waste, promote consistency, and ensure every dollar spent on an application’s environment delivers value. That means favoring uniform deployments and minimizing specialized setups that could increase costs.

While both teams work toward enterprise success, their differing perspectives often cause friction. The app team wants maximum performance; the infra team wants maximum efficiency. These goals don’t always align.

This misalignment can result in gaps in coverage, delayed incident response, and finger-pointing when things go wrong. Hoagland points out that even minor differences in how HA is defined or prioritized can lead to major issues in production environments.

“You can’t afford downtime for mission-critical workloads — but you also can’t afford inefficiencies at scale,” she notes. Finding that balance is key.

The first step to bridging the gap? Better communication. “Teams need to understand each other’s priorities,” says Hoagland. App teams must recognize the budgetary and operational pressures infra teams face, and infra teams need to appreciate the performance demands placed on application teams.

From a tooling and deployment perspective, solutions that support consistency, automated failover, and ease of management can help meet both goals. Organizations should also consider adopting shared KPIs and metrics for HA — ones that account for both performance and cost-effectiveness.

As enterprise systems become more complex, the need for tight alignment between application and infrastructure teams has never been greater. By fostering empathy, improving communication, and choosing infrastructure strategies that support both uptime and efficiency, organizations can reduce friction and improve outcomes.

For companies running high-stakes applications, that alignment could be the difference between seamless operations and major disruption.