SIOS Technology Corp. has announced the results of its 2026 State of Application Resilience Survey, revealing that despite widespread adoption of high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) technologies, most enterprises continue to experience downtime, struggle with increasingly complex hybrid infrastructures, and lack confidence in their existing resilience strategies.
The survey gathered responses from more than 250 IT leaders across North America and the United Kingdom, representing predominantly large enterprises across industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government, and technology. The research examined how organizations protect mission-critical applications from downtime and disasters while identifying emerging priorities for HA/DR investments.
Key findings include:
Downtime remains a persistent problem
76% of organizations experienced at least one outage lasting more than ten minutes over the past year despite having HA/DR protection in place, highlighting the limitations of many existing failover strategies.
Hybrid and multicloud environments have become the norm
Nearly seven in ten organizations now run critical applications across hybrid infrastructures, while only 2% operate exclusively on-premises, increasing the complexity of maintaining application availability across diverse environments.
Organizations lack confidence in their resilience strategies
Only about half of respondents said they were satisfied with their current HA/DR solutions, while many remained neutral or dissatisfied, suggesting existing solutions are falling short of enterprise expectations.
Disaster recovery testing remains inconsistent
Only 7% of organizations perform monthly disaster recovery testing, while one-third test just annually and 22% don’t know how frequently testing occurs, creating significant recovery risk.
Cyber security is reshaping high availability priorities
72% of respondents either already use or would consider using HA clustering to streamline patch management, reflecting growing recognition that application availability and cyber resilience are increasingly interconnected.
Complexity has overtaken cost as the biggest challenge
Configuration and management complexity ranked as organizations’ top HA/DR challenge, followed closely by integration across increasingly heterogeneous IT environments.
Investment priorities continue to rise
Improving disaster recovery protection ranked second only to cyber security among planned IT investments over the next 18 months, demonstrating that organizations are actively budgeting to strengthen resilience.
The survey also found that Windows remains the dominant operating system for mission-critical applications, but organizations increasingly manage mixed Windows and Linux environments, reinforcing the need for cross-platform HA solutions. Respondents also indicated growing interest in application-aware clustering technologies that can simplify operations while improving resilience across heterogeneous infrastructures.
