Suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) has been assessed in clinical trials as part of a “shock and kill” strategy to cure HIV-infected patients. While it was effective at inducing expression of HIV RNA "shock" , treatment with SAHA did not result in the reduction of reservoir size "kill". We therefore utilized a systems biology approach to dissect the mechanisms of action of SAHA that may explain its limited success in “shock and kill” strategies. CD4+ T cells from HIV seronegative donors were treated with 1 uM SAHA or its solvent dimethyl sulfoxide for 24 hours. Differential protein expression and post-translational modification was measured with two-dimensional liquid chromatography - tandem mass spectrometry iTRAQ proteomics. Gene expression changes were assessed by Illumina microarrays. Using limma package in the R computing environment, we identified 185 proteins, 18 phosphorylated forms, 4 acetylated forms and 2,982 genes, whose expression was modulated by SAHA. A protein interaction network integrating these 4 data types identified the transcriptional regulator HMGA1 to be upregulated by SAHA at the transcript, protein and acetylated protein levels. HMGA1 has been shown to repress HIV transcription, which is not optimal with respect to a shock and kill strategy. Further functional category assessment of proteins and genes modulated by SAHA identified gene ontology terms related to NFB signaling, protein folding and autophagy, which are all relevant to HIV reactivation. In summary, this study identified a number of host factors that may be therapeutically targeted to achieve more potent HIV reactivation in the “shock and kill” treatment, when using SAHA, either through modification of SAHA itself or through combination with other latency reversing agents. Finally, proteome profiling highlighted a number of potential adverse effects of SAHA, which transcriptome profiling alone would not have identified.