As Chief Operating Officer for SIOS Technology, Inc., Masahiro Arai is responsible for running day-to-day business operations, shaping the company’s strategic plans, and aligning priorities across worldwide sales, marketing, product management and engineering teams. He is a veteran enterprise software executive with a two-decade track record of driving growth and innovation.

We remain focused on delivering a solution that gives customers clear visibility into the health of their applications, enables them to prevent issues before they cause downtime, and restores operations quickly if an outage does occur.

Most recently, Masahiro served as Chief Executive Officer of BayPOS where he developed and executed software product and support strategies and led a distributed team responsible for product development, quality assurance, software deployment, and customer support. Masahiro currently works in the San Mateo, California office. He holds a Master’s Degree in Electronic Engineering, Robotics from Tokyo Denki University.

For readers who may not be familiar, can you start by giving us an overview of SIOS Technology, its mission, and how it has evolved from its roots in Japan to a global leader in high availability and disaster recovery solutions?

SIOS Technology was founded in Japan in 1999 with a mission to ensure business continuity through intelligent, automated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. Over the years, we’ve expanded globally, bringing our proven clustering and monitoring software to enterprises worldwide. Our flagship SIOS Protection Suite, including SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper solutions deliver protection for critical applications like SAP, SQL Server, and Oracle across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments.

By combining deep HA expertise with innovation in automation and ease of use, SIOS enables customers to minimize downtime, simplify operations, and protect essential workloads across any IT infrastructure. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, SIOS also operates an advanced R&D facility at the University of South Carolina’s M. Bert Storey Innovation Center in Columbia, which opened in 2018 to drive innovation in high availability and cloud resilience technologies.

What are some of the key industries that rely on SIOS software today, and what types of challenges do your customers face in maintaining uptime for their critical systems?

SIOS software is used across industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail, and government, where uninterrupted access to critical systems is vital. As IT environments grow more complex across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, customers face challenges maintaining uptime with limited resources. SIOS clustering and replication solutions automate failover, simplify management, and eliminate the need for shared storage, ensuring continuous availability and protection for mission-critical applications while reducing operational complexity and cost.

Patch management is a growing concern for IT teams. Can you explain how SIOS technology helps organizations achieve near-zero downtime during patching while maintaining security and compliance?

Patch management is one of the most significant challenges IT teams face today, as cyber-security threats are on the rise. Organizations are under pressure to apply security updates quickly without disrupting critical business operations. With SIOS clustering software, IT team run critical applications on a primary server and cluster it with a standby server. IT teams can apply patches to standby server while the primary system continues to operate and critical applications remain online.

Once updates are tested, validated, operation can be seamlessly switched over to the standby server and the update can be applied and tested on the primary server and the application can be switched back to it. This “rolling upgrade” approach allows organizations to maintain high availability while keeping systems secure and compliant with regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI, and NIST standards. By automating failover, monitoring application health, and simplifying recovery, SIOS not only protects mission-critical workloads during patching but also enables efficient patch testing, reduces operational complexity and costs. Our solutions give IT teams the confidence to maintain uptime while meeting strict security and compliance mandates.

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From your perspective, how are cybersecurity and high availability intersecting in today’s IT landscape?

In today’s IT landscape, cybersecurity and high availability are deeply interconnected. Protecting critical applications isn’t just about defending against attacks; it’s also about ensuring systems remain operational under all circumstances. Downtime caused by breaches or misconfigurations can be as damaging as the attack itself. Unplanned application downtime can even mean a security weakness. SIOS solutions bridge this gap by combining real-time monitoring, automated failover, and data replication to maintain high availability while applying security updates. By integrating HA with robust security practices, organizations can reduce risk, maintain compliance, and ensure that mission-critical workloads stay both protected and always online.

Many organizations are now managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments. How does SIOS help simplify high availability across such complex infrastructures?

Managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments adds complexity to maintaining high availability. SIOS simplifies this by providing clustering and replication solutions that work seamlessly across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures. SIOS LifeKeeper products enable automated failover, intelligent monitoring, and real-time data replication without requiring shared storage. This ensures mission-critical applications remain online, reduces operational complexity, and provides consistent protection across diverse environments, allowing IT teams to maintain uptime and business continuity with greater confidence.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for organizations striving for always-on availability in an increasingly digital world?

The biggest opportunity lies in leveraging high availability to support digital transformation at a time when the role of IT staff is rapidly changing. IT admins are being given more and more responsibility for the critical applications that their companies depend on. They are tasked with ensuring critical applications, databases, and services remain accessible, even across cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

High availability drives innovation, customer trust, and operational resilience. The challenge is balancing complexity, cost, and risk, especially as IT environments become more distributed and organizations face a shortage of specialized HA expertise. SIOS see opportunity in making high availability solutions intuitive and manageable for generalist IT teams is essential to maintain uptime, security, and compliance while reducing operational overhead.

Can you share an example of a customer success story where SIOS helped eliminate downtime or data loss during maintenance or unexpected failures?

SIOS customers consistently praise the solution for ease of use, reliability, and performance. IT administrators benefit from automated failover mechanisms that eliminate manual intervention, reducing downtime and operational complexity. Organizations using SIOS LifeKeeper report faster recovery times and improved system resilience, helping them maintain critical services even in sitewide or regional failures.

One customer, a global financial services provider, successfully implemented SIOS LifeKeeper to ensure continuous uptime for its transaction processing systems, preventing costly service interruptions. A leading healthcare provider, leveraged SIOS solutions to safeguard patient data and maintain compliance with strict regulatory requirements. With a proven track record of delivering high availability, disaster recovery, and security enhancements, SIOS continues to be a trusted choice for businesses seeking enterprise-grade resilience in their IT infrastructure.

The technology industry is moving rapidly toward AI and automation. How is SIOS leveraging these trends to improve resilience and ease of use for IT teams?

Application high availability requires expertise in the entire infrastructure stack. SIOS is products are moving to the next level of protection in three ways: by anticipating and alerting IT to issues before they cause downtime; by automating manual steps; and by providing observability that enables IT to make informed decisions

As COO, what are your priorities for driving innovation and growth at SIOS in the next few years?

SIOS has built its reputation as a trusted authority for organizations that need to protect their most business-critical applications. Our priority is to keep our products at the forefront of application high availability—leveraging proven technologies while designing for IT teams that may not have deep HA expertise. We remain focused on delivering a solution that gives customers clear visibility into the health of their applications, enables them to prevent issues before they cause downtime, and restores operations quickly if an outage does occur.

Finally, what advice would you give to IT leaders looking to strengthen their high availability strategies while balancing security, cost, and performance?

My advice to IT leaders is to take a holistic, proactive approach to high availability. Start by identifying the applications most critical to your business and ensure they’re protected with solutions that deliver both resilience and simplicity. Choose HA technologies that integrate seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments, minimizing complexity and cost. Automation and intelligent monitoring are key to reducing human error and improving efficiency. Finally, align HA with your cybersecurity strategy, ensuring patches, updates, and recovery processes can be performed without downtime or disruption.

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