Payment Solution Providers That Don’t Take Database Downtime Seriously Risk a Significant Price

When your organization provides responsible, real-time mission critical payment software for banks and merchants, unplanned downtime can prove catastrophic for your market credibility, customer reputation and revenue stream. Unfortunately, some organizations still don’t fully understand this. As such, they fail to prioritize database high availability and put themselves at unnecessary risk.

You don’t have to be one of them.

Your database management system (DBMS) is the heart of your IT stack, and ensuring it keeps running as expected is a top priority. This is one of the main reasons why so many businesses choose Postgres as their foundational database.

Across industries, Postgres is renowned for its high availability capabilities, boasting a wide range of features that guarantee data integrity, protect against breaches, mitigate human error and decrease risk of data loss. Each of these capabilities is specifically designed to ensure the ongoing success of your enterprise, powered by an Always On, always performant database.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper and offer guidance on:

• The power of high availability in Postgres;
• How to keep your payment processing offerings “Always On;”
• How EDB Postgres Distributed can turn high availability into extreme high availability.

The modern era of payment processing

In the last few years, the global payment solutions industry has experienced incredible growth. Market leaders like ACI Worldwide—which counts 19 of the top 20 world’s banks among its customers—are offering essential tools to major organizations, from insurance agencies to merchants. Because these payment solutions are so vital to customers’ business function and tech stack, providers need to be able to guarantee constant uptime. If their database fails, their solutions fail.

Downtime damages customer trust, revenue and data retention

Database downtime presents a major problem for payment solutions providers, and avoiding it should be a chief priority. When your solutions aren’t functioning because of an unscheduled outage, your customers will notice right away.

Even short periods of downtime—especially unplanned outages—can have a major impact on your revenue and your reputation—not to mention potential compliance and legal ramifications. While a planned maintenance outage can be announced in advance, an unscheduled outage will always take customers by surprise—disrupting the processing of a sale and souring the customer who is now furiously hitting refresh to understand what’s happening.

But the problem goes deeper than mere convenience. Not only does an outage in your payment processing application disrupt the current transaction, but it can lead to a loss of critical transaction data—an incredibly valuable asset when it comes to interacting with customers both new and old. Your business’ inability to prevent data loss further reflects back on your trustworthiness in the eyes of the customer.

The impact adds up

When this happens even once it can be an issue—particularly for enterprises who are dealing with transactions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If downtime becomes a regular problem, the ramifications can completely disrupt your enterprise’s place in the market.

Whether for major essential technologies or daily conveniences, your client base trusts you and relies on you. There’s no quicker way to disintegrate those relationships than by routinely proving you can’t be there to provide the service you promised when they want it.

This is why high availability is essential—and why extreme high availability is ideal.

Achieving extreme high availability with EDB

As defined by EDB, extreme high availability provides organizations with up to five 9s of database availability, whether they’re on-premises, in the cloud or leveraging hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures. The promise of five nines means that their database will be functioning 99.999% of the time—nearly zero downtime. For payment processing providers, this means that your applications won’t see more than five and a half minutes of downtime in a year. On a daily basis, that amounts to just 864 milliseconds.

“In today’s technological and business environment, you never know what can happen to a business,” Jack Bloch, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at ACI Worldwide told EDB. Since adopting EDB Postgres Distributed, ACI hasn’t had to worry about database downtime.

So, how does EDB accomplish this? With EDB Postgres Distributed—our premiere high availability solution—we address scheduled and unscheduled outages alike, strengthening Postgres’s reliability and disaster recovery capabilities. While this primarily allows EDB Postgres Distributed to eliminate nearly all unscheduled downtime, it also minimizes the downtime businesses often write off as unavoidable, such as during a Postgres database upgrade. 

Via multi-master replication and data distribution with advanced conflict management, data-loss protection and throughput up to 5X faster than Postgres native logical replication, EDB Postgres Distributed ensures that your database is functioning at peak performance, even during necessary maintenance. This extreme high availability is how we define an “Always On” database.

When designing EDB Postgres Distributed, we took into consideration all the challenges highly transactional businesses might face, building a solution that’s ideal for industries like payment processing. With your database firing on all cylinders all the time, you’re providing the reliability your customers expect and the stability your teams need.

Stop worrying about outages and grow your business 

For highly transactional businesses, payment processing applications are among the most important elements of an IT stack. Not only are they key to driving revenue, but—as the part of your stack with which your customers most directly interact—their functionality can decide for a client whether you’re the business for them. You cannot afford for them to fail.

That’s why so many businesses like yours choose EDB Postgres Distributed: it combines the reliability of Postgres databases with extreme high availability, bolstered by a range of features that you can tailor to your organization’s specific needs. With EDB Postgres Distributed, you can supercharge your Postgres and drastically reduce—if not altogether erase—unplanned outages.

The result is a payment processing apparatus that functions effectively and consistently, consistently meeting your and your customers standards and goals.

Want to learn more about how to achieve extreme high availability for Postgres databases? Check out our eBook "EDB Postgres Distributed: The Next Generation of PostgreSQL High Availability!"