The #1 Secret to Bulletproofing Your Payments Infrastructure: Multi-Cloud

In today’s 24/7, always-on business culture, consumers demand that critical payments infrastructure operates seamlessly and without interruption. Processing thousands of transactions every minute, these systems are required to be ultra-reliable and resilient in the face of exponentially increasing volumes and velocity of data. With growing regulatory requirements and ever-present security threats, a single point of failure in the payments infrastructure can quickly become a game-changer that nobody wants to be a part of.

The solution that modern financial institutions seek today must maintain an exceptional standard of operational resilience. When things go wrong and services fail, businesses stand to lose substantial revenue and reputation. Amidst such a complex environment, a multi-cloud strategy is becoming pivotal in enabling them to survive and thrive, mitigate risks, and grow efficiently. To help decision-makers make wise choices and design sustainable payment operations, this short guide offers a dive into how multi-cloud can help create an operationally resilient payments infrastructure.

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Operational resilience in payments: Key goals to aim for

Operational resilience reflects the payment systems’ ability to anticipate, prevent, respond to, and recover from disruptions, helping reduce the likelihood of these disruptions occurring in the first place. This capability helps businesses put together coherent plans that ensure when unexpected challenges turn up out of the blue, nothing stops their operations, whatever it takes.

When setting up that reliable core of the payment network, organizations want to make sure that their critical infrastructure meets some rigorous requirements that hinge on preserving its resilience. In more specific terms, achieving and maintaining operational resilience in the payments space entails the seamless integration of key considerations that contribute to crafting a robust resilience framework: Business Continuity Management, Operational Risk Management, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, and Corporate Governance are the most common of these.

However, while current IT technology and best practices recommend standardization to simplify deployment, the evolving requirements of resilient architectures can actually lead to technology complexity as resilience alone does not require the complex orchestration that would simplify operational risk management.

Why Multi-Cloud holds the answer to Operational Resilience in Payments

To withstand increasingly rigorous tests, payments infrastructure systems must introduce resilience-enhancing strategies early on. Some of the industry-acknowledged strategies focused on pre-empting these incidents include geographic redundancies and IT infrastructure that supports business continuity plans, data duplication and back-up management etc. Since these components introduce and multiply to no small extend system fragility, those might be tricky goals to manage.

Enter, multi-cloud: An architecture designed for operational resilience, ensuring adequate hosting, with different geographic redundancy to achieve resilience beyond potential site-specific issues with adequate control over overall load balancing. An infrastructure which reduces risk through automatic data offload and transfer capabilities, has better resource utilization as infrastructure elements are segregated across clouds and is adaptable to fast evolving market by enabling payers the benefits of cloud native technologies and more. A fundamental difference between various cloud approaches lies between the open architecture in multi-cloud strategy and relatively proprietary and closely-coupled standard in cloudstack.

Working with a diverse cloud service provider (CSP) portfolio supports the principle of active multiple supplier policies while mitigating over-reliance on a limited number of suppliers.

Additional Multi-Cloud benefits which can support payments-specific compliance requirements include

Data Security is strongly increased through multi-cloud management. By effectively leveraging information that otherwise would either need additional external expertise for ongoing monitoring and proper threat response or might not even be a service currently covered.

Improved, High Quality Service Availability- The more sophisticated load balancing of the infrastructure reduces service overload. These capabilities can lead to more advanced data security by building more stable, higher secure data-sharing from inside the company as well as outside. As previously discussed, cross cloud (or hybrid) redundancies ultimately strengthens resilience over their Public Cloud counterparts by supporting local control while achieving substantial resilience beyond their conventional scope of impact within geographic events.

Simplified Compliance in IT: Multi-cloud infrastructure is fully customizable from each cloud provider, so there could be full compatibility without difficulty achieving highly complex custom integrations and different internal Cloud Solution Packages. Additional cloud products only need to be paid for as utilized or based on what they help the custom integrations and different packages accomplish. Management of cloud interconnections - and integrating the technology across existing network - in this case it has the added complexity that no solution could more effectively address, it is likely best understood in context as the means to securely run that system in cloud where such infrastructure currently has the biggest risk profile given the current situation. Now, multi-cloud integrates by cloud services in a way that is simple, secure and easy yet it will even require direct integration into a pre-existing network.