By Nicole Dunn, Co-founder and COO of Precium
CrowdStrike, a leader in cybersecurity solutions, experienced a major service disruption due to a technical glitch in their cloud-based infrastructure. This unexpected downtime lasted for approximately 14 hours, leaving numerous businesses grappling with the fallout. Payment processing services were among the hardest hit, as many financial institutions and e-commerce platforms rely on CrowdStrike for robust security measures to protect transactions.
The impact
The interruption in CrowdStrike’s services had a cascading effect on payment processing systems. Payment gateways, which facilitate transactions between customers and merchants, depend heavily on real-time security protocols to prevent fraud and ensure the integrity of financial data. With CrowdStrike’s platform offline, many of these gateways were unable to process transactions securely, leading to failed transactions, significant processing delays, and in some cases, a complete halt in payment operations.
For businesses, this translated into immediate financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and potential reputational damage. E-commerce platforms reported millions of dollars in lost sales as customers encountered payment errors and delays during checkout resulting in cart abandonment. Known South African businesses impacted included Capitec Bank, Lift Airlines, Airlink, and Absa Bank.
The case for redundancy
This startling reminder of the fragility of digital infrastructure highlights a crucial lesson for businesses: the necessity of investing in redundancy within their technology and payments operations.
Redundancy, which refers to the inclusion of additional or backup systems that can take over in case the primary system fails, extends across all facets of the modern business– from infrastructure, to performance, to processes. Given the business critical function of payment processing, technology leaders should assess whether their current providers offer redundancy at each of these levels:
1. Infrastructure redundancy: This includes having backup servers, data centres, and network pathways to ensure that if one component fails, another can take over without disruption. Businesses should assess whether their payment provider offers geographic redundancy and automated failover between availability zones, to guard against localised incidents, frequent database back-ups, and blue-green deployments to ensure maximum uptime.
2. Performance redundancy: Using multiple vendors for critical services such as payment processing can mitigate the risk of a single point of failure. Businesses should aim to embed redundancy at each stage of the payments value chain, including multiple acquirers (banks), processors, and gateways. Payment orchestrators, such as Precium, can support this end-to-end redundancy, while mitigating the complexity for businesses managing multiple suppliers.
3. Process redundancy: A well-defined business continuity and incident management plan can mitigate the impact of downtime on business operations and customers through enabling proactive support and communication. Businesses should assess their payment providers’ incident management and business continuity plans, and where possible, subscribe to real-time monitoring and alerting to enable rapid communication and remediation of issues.
Investing in redundancy is essentially investing in resilience. By investing in payment redundancy, businesses can safeguard against disruptions, maintain customer trust, and ensure ongoing operational success. With the growing interconnectedness of modern technologies, growth in online commerce, and ‘always-on’ customer expectations, redundancy is not just an option– it’s a necessity