When major IT failures occur, it is often payment gateways that make headlines.
Shoppers are stuck at checkout counters and in bars, queues are growing, and businesses are forced to abandon trade.
For merchants, these moments are more than just inconveniences—they are reminders that reliability is not an aspiration. This is a responsibility.
In payments, sustainability determines whether businesses will continue to borrow money in unexpected circumstances. However, resilience does not happen by accident.
This is the result of earlier architectural choices—decisions about cloud strategy, redundancy, and observability.
This choice determines whether the system will bend or break under pressure.
Design for failure
Resilient systems assume that failure is inevitable. Equipment will degrade and networks will fail. The goal is not to avoid failures entirely, but to compensate for them gracefully so that transactions continue even when components fail.
It all starts with a cloud architecture distributed across multiple regions and, most importantly, across multiple cloud providers. Instead of viewing the cloud as a single dependency, payment systems should view it as a collection of interchangeable parts. When one data center degrades, workloads automatically move to another with the required capacity.
A recent Dojo study found that one in five (20%) hospitality executives cited payment failures or downtime as a top challenge for their organization, with payment system failures disrupting more than half (58%) of businesses on a weekly basis.
With such pressure on payment systems and the resulting loss of revenue, businesses must ensure they have IT infrastructure in place, so if one component or even one cloud region fails, the transaction will still succeed.
The buyer does not notice this, but the seller continues to trade.
Eliminate single points of failure: operate proactively and proactively in the clouds
Traditional “active-passive” schemes – where backup the system sits idle until something breaks – it's too slow for real-time payments. The modern approach is active-active, where live traffic constantly flows through multiple environments at the same time.
By distributing the load between two or more clouds, the platform avoids dependence on any one provider. This is protection against correlated risks that could disrupt entire supply chains if a shared dependency fails.
This is what ensures uninterrupted operation at the level of 99.99%, and not marketing spin, but an engineering discipline. Redundancy only matters if it is active, tested and observable. Supplier diversity is not only performance; it's about isolating risk. Different clouds fail in different ways. This heterogeneity is a strength.
The paradox of reliability is that it comes from failure. You don't achieve uptime by assuming perfection, but by assuming imperfection and designing for it.
Resilience on the edge
The resilience of the infrastructure means little if the terminal cannot communicate with it. Payments occur at the periphery – in cafes, restaurants and shops, often over unreliable networks. That's why resilience must extend from the data center to the device.
Payment terminals must use 4G SIM cards with multiple telecom operators, which automatically select the most reliable network. If the seller's Wi-Fi goes down, the terminal switches to mobile data. If one operator goes down, another takes over.
End-to-end observability is equally important. We maintain visibility from device to data center, monitoring for spikes in latency or packet loss that may signal a problem. This allows our operations teams to reroute or rebalance before customers notice disruptions.
It's a reminder that sustainability is not just an internal issue. For traders, experience is an advantage. If the terminal is working, trading continues. If this doesn't happen, reliability elsewhere doesn't matter.
Reliability as a competitive advantage
The best resilience strategies are invisible when they work. Clients do not see multi-region replication or active-active routing. They simply see the payments go through, the first time every time.
Behind this simplicity lies a cultural choice. Ensuring reliability means investing in redundancy that, if all goes well, will rarely be used. This means testing production failure scenarios and empowering engineers to prioritize stability over novelty.
Ultimately, reliability is a matter of trust. When companies choose a payments provider, they're not just buying technology—they're buying a guarantee that their revenue stream won't stop. There will be blackouts. The question is whether payments will be suspended or continued.
Resilience is not the last layer to be added to the existing mix. This is the foundation on which everything else rests. Build systems to withstand failure, eliminate individual weak points, extend resilience to the limits, and your systems will survive even when others fail.
Because in payments, reliability is not just technical excellence. This is business continuity.
Check out our feature on the best trading services.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel, where we profile the best and brightest minds in today's tech industry. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in participating, find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
