Load shedding has a major impact on economic confidence and often debilitates businesses’ ability to operate. South African retail has been one of the hardest-hit industries, with losses in sales and additional costs running into the many billions of Rand. As a result, local retailers have been forced to make major investments to ensure daily trade stays unaffected by Eskom’s load shedding stages and blackouts.
From a payments processing perspective, Ecentric Payment Systems understands the importance of retailers being able to service their customers 24/7, even in the midst of power cuts. Considerable investment has been made by Ecentric to ensure the power to equipment stays on, and that the company’s near 100% availability record continues to be maintained. Ecentric’s infrastructure is highly redundant by design and constantly enhanced and extended to ensure customers receive a high quality of service.
Ecentric delivers their near 100% uptime strategy through geographically separated sites, highly redundant communication links and infrastructure and providing a multi-acquiring bank option to it’s clients. Over the years, Ecentric has enhanced their UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply); migrated secondary processing site to an upgraded class 5 data centre; established a third processing site for disaster recovery; expanded alternate data communications links to key processing points; implemented proactive monitoring to recognize problem acquirers, issuers, checkouts and problem transactions much earlier; and undertaken an ISAE 4400 accreditation for business continuity and disaster recovery procedures.
These measures, when implemented in conjunction with Ecentric’s proven Active/Active and Dual Acquirer Ecentric platform, ensure that customers can focus on their business without the added burden that power cuts and unreliable load shedding schedules might bring. For transaction processing, Ecentric accepts full responsibility for high availability and fast turnaround at checkouts.