SIOS survey finds outages persist despite resilience spend

SIOS has published findings from its 2026 State of Application Resilience Survey, pointing to continued outages and low confidence in existing high availability and disaster recovery measures.

Responses from more than 250 IT leaders in North America and the United Kingdom showed that many large organisations still face interruptions to critical applications despite investment in resilience tools. Respondents came from sectors including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government and technology.

Among the most notable findings, 76% of organisations said they had experienced at least one outage lasting more than 10 minutes over the past year. The figure suggests that high availability and disaster recovery systems have not removed the risk of service disruption for many enterprises.

The survey also found that hybrid and multicloud environments are now commonplace. Nearly seven in 10 organisations run critical applications across hybrid infrastructure, while just 2% operate exclusively on premises.

That shift has added operational strain. Configuration and management complexity ranked as the leading challenge for high availability and disaster recovery, ahead of cost, while integration across mixed IT environments also featured prominently.

Confidence in current systems appeared limited. Only about half of respondents said they were satisfied with their existing high availability and disaster recovery arrangements. The rest were either neutral or dissatisfied.

Testing gaps

The findings also highlighted weak spots in disaster recovery testing. Only 7% of organisations said they conduct testing every month, while one-third test only once a year. A further 22% said they did not know how often testing takes place.

These results suggest many companies may struggle to confirm whether recovery plans will work under pressure. Infrequent testing can leave technical and procedural faults undiscovered until an outage or security incident occurs.

Cyber focus

Cybersecurity is increasingly shaping resilience planning. According to the survey, 72% of respondents either already use or would consider using high availability clustering to simplify patch management.

That reflects a broader overlap between uptime planning and cyber defence. Keeping systems available is no longer treated solely as an infrastructure issue, particularly as patching, ransomware resilience and recovery planning become more closely linked.

The research also showed where organisations expect to direct spending over the next 18 months. Improving disaster recovery protection ranked second only to cybersecurity among planned IT investments.

Windows remains the main operating system for mission-critical applications, but many organisations now manage a mix of Windows and Linux systems. That adds another layer of operational complexity for IT teams trying to maintain consistent resilience policies across different workloads and environments.

The survey also pointed to growing interest in application-aware clustering tools designed to manage heterogeneous estates. Organisations appear to be looking for approaches that reduce administrative burden while improving service continuity across physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure.

Masahiro Arai, Chief Operating Officer at SIOS, said the findings point to a gap between investment and outcomes. "The survey makes it clear that organizations have invested heavily in protecting mission-critical applications, but many are still experiencing downtime and operational complexity that traditional HA/DR approaches weren't designed to address," Arai said.

He added that changing infrastructure patterns and security demands are reshaping resilience requirements. "As enterprises adopt hybrid and multicloud architectures while facing increasing cybersecurity threats, application resilience has become far more than failover. Organisations need intelligent, application-aware clustering solutions that simplify operations, accelerate patching, improve cyber resilience and ensure continuous availability across increasingly complex environments," he said.