As businesses pivot toward automation and resilience readiness in 2026, leaders place the conversation around High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) at the center of customer experience rather than confining it to the server room. Every second of downtime translates to lost trust, shrinking margins, and disrupted journeys. Yet, managing resilient infrastructures often remains complex and unintuitive for the very people who maintain them: system administrators.
Enter SIOS Technology Corp. with its latest breakthrough—LifeKeeper v10—a release that doesn’t just advance clustering technology but fundamentally reshapes how admins, developers, and ops teams approach resilience. By introducing the LifeKeeper Web Management Console (LKWMC), SIOS takes a human-centered leap in visibility, control, and simplicity across Linux and Windows systems.
For Masahiro Arai, COO of SIOS Technology Corp., this launch represents far more than a product upgrade. It’s part of a larger CX-driven mission: to deliver the industry’s first truly admin-centric HA/DR platform, empowering organizations to protect mission-critical workloads without the complexity usually associated with clustering environments.
In this exclusive CXQuest interview, Arai discusses how SIOS LifeKeeper v10 bridges the gap between IT resilience and the overall customer experience, exploring what this evolution means for 2026’s enterprise landscape.
A Warm Welcome, Masahiro Arai, COO of SIOS Technology Corp.
Q1. Masahiro-san, congratulations on the launch of SIOS LifeKeeper v10. To start, how are you feeling about this milestone, and how does it align with SIOS’s long-term vision?
MA: LifeKeeper v10 represents an important milestone for our team because it reflects years of listening carefully to our customers and translating their operational challenges into practical innovation. More than just a release, it advances our long-term vision to make high availability simpler, more intuitive, and more resilient as IT environments grow more complex, and it reinforces our commitment to being a trusted foundation for our customers’ mission-critical systems.
Q2. The new Web Management Console has already drawn attention. Could you share what inspired the idea of building a unified, admin-friendly console for both Linux and Windows environments?
MA: We were inspired directly by our customers, who told us they were spending too much time navigating different tools instead of focusing on system stability and performance. The unified console reflects our belief that high availability should reduce complexity, not add to it, by giving administrators a clear, consistent experience across both Linux and Windows.
Q3. Many system administrators describe HA/DR setup as a “necessary complexity.” What design philosophies or customer feedback shaped your approach to simplifying that complexity in LifeKeeper v10?
MA: We approached LifeKeeper v10 with the belief that complexity should live in the software, not in the administrator’s daily work, and that philosophy guided every design decision we made. Customer feedback consistently pointed to the need for clearer workflows, fewer manual steps, and better visibility across systems, so we focused on making HA/DR easier to deploy, easier to manage, and more predictable to operate.
Streamlining the Pricing Model
Q4. This pricing model streamlines a market that enterprise vendors often define through complex licensing layers. Could you walk us through the business thinking behind that decision?
MA: We simplified our pricing because we want customers to clearly understand what they are investing in and immediately see the value they are receiving. From a business perspective, transparency builds trust, and trust is essential when you are providing software that customers rely on for their most critical systems.
Q5. From a customer experience standpoint, what does LifeKeeper v10 change in how businesses think about resilience? Is SIOS redefining “uptime” as a measurable CX metric?
MA: LifeKeeper v10 shifts the conversation from simply keeping systems running to ensuring the business experience remains uninterrupted for customers and employees alike. In that sense, uptime becomes more than a technical goal. It becomes a measurable expression of customer trust and operational excellence.
Q6. You’ve mentioned that LifeKeeper v10 is part of a broader admin-centric strategy. How does this philosophy influence the roadmap for upcoming releases?
MA: An admin-centric approach means we start every roadmap conversation by asking how we can make daily operations simpler, clearer, and more reliable for the people running our software. That perspective will continue to shape our releases by prioritizing usability, automation, and visibility alongside the core requirements of resilience and performance.
Growing Needs of Hybrid Enterprises
Q7. Could you expand on how the new PowerShell integration and support for RHEL 9.6 and RHEL 10 fit into the growing needs of hybrid enterprises?
MA: SIOS offers a wide range of application recovery kits (ARKS) for popular applications, databases, and environments that contain instructions for starting and stopping the various services associated with an application or database. They perform the failover process according to the best practices of the application vendor and they ensure stable, predictable failover and ongoing operation. Customers can now use PowerShell to create custom application kits for additional applications or environments that are not covered by our ARK library.
Q8. System admins today manage an increasing mix of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. In what ways does LifeKeeper v10 make cross-environment resilience more intuitive and less error-prone?
MA: LifeKeeper v10 was designed to give administrators a consistent experience across environments, so they are not forced to relearn HA/DR as their infrastructure evolves. By standardizing workflows and improving visibility across physical, virtual, and cloud systems, we help reduce manual effort and the risk of configuration errors.
Q9. Many organizations still struggle to connect IT uptime metrics with customer satisfaction. How do you see HA/DR evolving into a customer experience enabler in 2026 and beyond?
MA: High availability will increasingly be viewed not as an IT safeguard, but as a direct driver of customer trust and brand reputation. As we move into 2026 and beyond, organizations will measure resilience not only in technical terms, but by how consistently customers can rely on their digital services without disruption.
Vision of HA/DR Landscape
Q10. Finally, if you were to look five years ahead, what’s your vision of the HA/DR landscape—and how do you see SIOS shaping that future from both a technological and human-first perspective?
MA: Five years from now, the HA/DR landscape will be defined by the growing complexity of application environments driven by the imperative to improve IT cost-savings and efficiency. Enterprises are saving money by moving toward increasingly complex distributed, hybrid, and AI-driven architectures, but they still expect HA/DR to “just work” with minimal specialized expertise. The winners in this next era will be the vendors who can deliver application protection with far greater simplicity, automation, and intelligence.
From a technology perspective, we see a future where clustering can be managed by IT Admins with the level of observability and control they need to be confident in the availability of their applications. Our roadmap is aligned to that future with expanded APIs, deeper cloud integrations, and increasingly application-aware protection.
On the human side, most organizations today don’t have teams of clustering experts; they have smart generalists trying to keep complex environments running. Our vision is to empower those teams by removing friction, reducing cognitive load, and giving them tools that feel intuitive rather than intimidating. That means better automation, clearer workflows, richer observability, and support experiences that feel like a partner, not a ticket system.
In five years, we expect SIOS to redefine HA/DR so it remains sophisticated under the hood yet accessible to every IT team. Technology will continue to advance—but our role is to make sure customers can harness that power without sacrificing simplicity, reliability, or peace of mind.
Uptime and Customer Trust is Prime
As enterprises navigate the convergence of automation, cloud orchestration, and always-on engagement, consequently, the conversation around uptime and customer trust is increasingly becoming indistinguishable. Back-end engineering concerns have, in fact, evolved into front-line experience factors; moreover, this shift underscores how deeply technology and customer perception now intertwine.
SIOS LifeKeeper v10 isn’t simply a product—it’s a statement that admin empowerment, operational simplicity, and cost transparency are essential to next-generation resilience strategy. By viewing HA/DR through the lens of user experience, SIOS reminds the industry that every resilient system begins with an empowered, confident, and connected administrator.
In 2026, when customer experience is no longer optional but existential, tools like SIOS LifeKeeper v10 signal what the future holds—a world where operational resilience and customer trust move in perfect synchrony.
