Business Continuity, Service Availability & Load Balancing

In terms of high availability, the cloud is a significant step forward compared to hosting a processing platform in physical data centers.

In order to provide a high level of service guarantee, processing services hosted in physical data centers will require an active primary data center, one or more secondary centers on “hot” or “cold standby” and a set of processes or procedures to activate the secondary facility in the event of a problem at the primary.

For processors running in traditional data centers, a disaster recovery and associated business continuity plan are a critical asset, documenting the process that allows for spinning up the backup site and continuing transaction processing, during which there may be impact to the production service over a period of minutes/days.

CLOWD9, within a single cloud region is served by 3 or more cloud data centers referred to as availability zones.

These availability zones are active/active/active and available to process any transaction at the same time by design. The architecture also allows for effective automatic load balancing across each of the 3 data centers and even across regions.

Any downtime (planned or otherwise) from one or two of these data centers results in zero service outage.

To further enhance this availability, CLOWD9 has built a multi-region interconnected processing platform.

This means CLOWD9 can support full cross regional replication of the data required for transaction processing, such as historical transactions, various card/customer details and other vital configuration - in accordance with any on-soil data processing and residency requirements, be that legal or customer initiated - as well as deploying the exact same codebase in all regions.

As a consequence, using the intelligent load balancing capability of the CLOWD9 service mesh, even loss of an entire AWS region and the availability zones within it means that traffic can be seamlessly redirected to the nearest available region.

The immediately scalability of the platform cloud architecture means that the new region will autoscale to support the additional load than may result.