When major IT outages occur, it is often the payment gateways that make the headlines.
Customers got stuck at cash registers and bars, queues got longer and businesses were forced to refuse transactions.
For traders, these moments are more than just an inconvenience: they remind them that reliability is not an aspiration. It is a responsibility.
In payments, resilience determines whether companies will continue to receive money when unexpected events occur. But resilience doesn’t just happen.
It is the product of previously made architectural decisions: decisions about cloud strategy, redundancy, and observability.
These decisions determine whether a system will bend or break under pressure.
Design to fail
Resilient systems assume that failure is inevitable. Hardware will degrade and networks will fail. The goal is not to prevent failures completely, but to handle them gracefully, that is, to maintain transaction flow even if components fail.
It starts with a cloud-based architecture that spans multiple regions and, more importantly, multiple cloud providers. Instead of viewing the cloud as a single dependency, payment systems should view it as a series of interchangeable components. If a data center’s performance is affected, workloads are automatically moved to another data center with capacity.
New research from Dojo shows that one in five (20%) hotel managers cite late payments or downtime as a specific problem for their business, and payment system failures cause disruption to more than half (58%) of businesses every week.
With the strain on payment systems and the resulting impact on lost revenue, companies must ensure that they have the IT infrastructure in place to ensure the success of transactions even if a component or even part of the cloud fails.
The customer does not notice and the dealer continues to negotiate.
Eliminate discrete sources of error: Take an active and proactive approach across all clouds
Traditional “active-passive” setups, where a backup system remains inactive until something fails, are too slow for real-time payments. The modern approach is active-active, where real traffic flows continuously through multiple environments simultaneously.
By distributing the load between two or more clouds, a platform avoids lock-in to a single provider. This is a hedge against associated risks, the kind that can cripple entire supply chains if a common dependency fails.
This is what’s behind 99.99% uptime: it’s not a marketing strategy, but a technical discipline. Redundancy is only important if it is active, tested and observable. And supplier diversity isn’t just about performance; It is about isolating the risks. Different clouds fail differently. This heterogeneity is a strong point.
The paradox of reliability is that it comes from the acceptance of failure. Achieve will not by embracing perfection, but by embracing imperfection and designing around it.
Edge strength
Infrastructure resilience doesn’t mean much if the endpoint can’t communicate with it. Payments are made in the suburbs, in bars, restaurants and shops, often via unreliable networks. Therefore, resilience must extend from the data center to the device.
Payment terminals must use 4G SIM cards with multiple operators that automatically select the most powerful network. If a merchant’s Wi-Fi goes down, the terminal switches to mobile data. When one company goes bankrupt, another takes over.
Continuous observability is equally important. We provide visibility from the device to the data center and monitor for any latency spikes or packet loss that may indicate a problem. This allows our operations teams to redirect or rebalance their processes before customers notice any disruptions.
This reminds us that resilience is not just a matter of fact. For retailers, the advantage is experience. If the terminal works, exchanges continue. If not, reliability elsewhere doesn’t matter.
Reliability as a competitive advantage
The best resilience strategies are invisible when they work. Customers do not see cross-region replication or active active routing. You can easily see how payments work, the first time, every time.
Behind this simplicity lies a cultural choice. Creating reliability means investing in redundancy that, if all goes well, rarely needs to be used. This means testing failure scenarios in production and engineers can prioritize stability over novelty.
Ultimately, reliability is about trust. When businesses choose a payment provider, they’re not only buying technology, they’re also buying peace of mind knowing their revenue streams won’t stop. There will be failures. The question is whether the payments will stop or continue.
Resilience is not a final layer added to an existing stack. It is the foundation on which everything else rests. Prepare for disruptions, eliminate individual vulnerabilities, extend resilience to the edge and your systems will survive when others fail.
Because in payment transactions, reliability is not just a matter of technical excellence. It is about continuity in the business.
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