Astro Malaysia Achieves 99.99% Uptime for SAP and Oracle on AWS

The News

SIOS Technology Corp. announced that Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad has achieved 99.99% uptime for its critical SAP and Oracle operations on AWS using SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux. Astro, Malaysia’s leading content and entertainment provider serving 5.2 million homes and 8,900 businesses, migrated its core SAP and Oracle database systems to AWS and required a high-availability (HA) solution certified by SAP, AWS, and Oracle Linux.

The company selected SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux, the only SAP-certified HA solution supported by AWS for Oracle Linux, for its reliability, ease of administration, and performance assurance. Since implementation, Astro reports 99.99% uptime, reduced administrative burden, operational efficiency gains, and avoided costs associated with preventable downtime. SIOS reiterates that cloud high availability still requires deliberate architecture and proven tooling.

Analyst Take

99.99% Uptime Reflects Strong Execution and Solid Architectural Choices

Astro’s achievement of 99.99% uptime for its SAP and Oracle environments is a meaningful milestone. For mission-critical enterprise applications, this level of availability aligns with what organizations strive for as they migrate complex workloads to cloud platforms.

While 99.99% uptime is generally considered an industry baseline for enterprise systems, achieving it in practice (especially with large, legacy workloads) requires thoughtful design, the right tools, and disciplined operations. Our research shows that many organizations still face challenges in resilience planning; 45% report gaps in infrastructure readiness for failure recovery. Astro’s results demonstrate what’s possible when those gaps are addressed with the appropriate HA solution and operational rigor.

SIOS’s point that “high availability in the cloud is not automatic” reflects a common reality: cloud providers offer foundational building blocks, but organizations must still implement and manage the end-to-end architecture. The uptime Astro reports, approximately 52 minutes of allowable downtime per year, is noteworthy given the nature of SAP and Oracle workloads.

Third-Party HA Solutions Play an Important Role for Legacy Enterprise Applications

Astro’s choice of SIOS LifeKeeper highlights where third-party HA solutions continue to provide value. AWS offers strong resilience capabilities, but these are optimized for cloud-native and distributed applications. Many long-standing enterprise workloads (SAP ECC/S4HANA, Oracle databases on EC2, and bespoke legacy systems) still require application-aware clustering that cloud-native services don’t fully replicate.

SIOS could fill this space by providing automated failover and workload intelligence tailored to these environments. For organizations running critical applications that are not yet modernized or refactored, this type of solution can offer both predictability and operational confidence.

The certification requirements across SAP, AWS, and Oracle Linux also reinforce how important interoperability and validated support matrices are in enterprise environments. For teams planning similar migrations, these certifications may provide helpful assurance while navigating what can otherwise be a complex compatibility landscape.

“Minimal Administrative Effort” Signals Operational Maturity

SIOS notes that Astro achieved “minimal administrative effort” after deployment, which many organizations aim for when adopting HA solutions. In mature environments with well-defined operational practices, steady-state management can, in fact, be relatively streamlined.

That said, the full operational picture typically includes initial configuration, testing, and ongoing monitoring. These are all areas where skill and experience influence outcomes. While Astro’s experience sounds positive, organizations assessing similar solutions should obtain clear metrics around implementation timelines, failover testing, MTTR, and team workload before and after adoption. These details help contextualize what “minimal effort” means for their own environments and teams.

Looking Ahead

Astro’s success underscores the continued importance of third-party HA platforms for organizations running core enterprise applications in the cloud. As more workloads move to AWS and other providers, solutions like SIOS could offer a practical bridge by helping enterprises achieve required levels of reliability even before broader modernization efforts take place.

Longer term, the industry trend continues toward managed services, distributed architectures, and cloud-native resilience that reduce operational overhead. Organizations evaluating their roadmap should consider how legacy HA tooling fits into their modernization journey and whether future investments will shift toward cloud-native database services or re-architected applications.

As cloud platforms enhance their built-in resilience capabilities, the differentiators for third-party HA solutions will increasingly center on operational simplicity, measurable efficiency gains, and support for mission-critical workloads that cannot easily be replatformed in the near term.

Author

  • Paul Nashawaty

    Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.

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