Building resilience in payments: Why multi-cloud is the future

Thought Leadership· min March 4, 2025

The continuous provision of important financial services by institutions is more and more reliant on the resilience of their respective cloud service providers (CSPs). Customers and businesses alike expect instant access to their money, and regulators are demanding this resilience through direct regulation.

To compete in this new environment, banks are embarking on digital strategies of which cloud adoption is an intrinsic part and the most resilient model for this that we now see is a ‘multi-cloud’ strategy. Developing a strategy that involves a multi-cloud provides a solid foundation for IT resilience and introduces a wide range of additional advantages including greater agility, the ability to scale and a range of other benefits.

The cost of payment downtime

It’s easy to think of cloud outages as purely a technical challenge, but for financial institutions, the impact runs far deeper. When payments fail, reputations suffer, customers lose confidence, and regulators take notice.

Institutions should ask themselves: if our cloud provider suffered a critical failure today, could we continue processing payments seamlessly? If the answer is no, it’s time to reconsider the institution’s approach to resilience.

A multi-cloud strategy mitigates concentration risk, ensuring payment services remain uninterrupted even if one provider experiences downtime. It provides financial institutions with the flexibility to shift workloads dynamically, maintaining business as usual without customers ever noticing a disruption.

How multi-cloud strengthens payments infrastructure

A multi-cloud approach means distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers—such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—ensuring that no single point of failure can disrupt the entire system.

It enhances resilience in three key areas:

Redundancy and Failover

Every payment institution needs a backup plan. Multi-cloud ensures that if one cloud provider experiences an outage, another takes over seamlessly. This automatic failover means transactions continue without disruption, reducing financial and reputational risk. Take the example of a bank relying solely on a single cloud provider: if that provider experiences a regional service outage, all payment operations grind to a halt. With a multi-cloud setup, transactions would be rerouted to an alternative provider instantly, preventing delays and maintaining uptime.

Redundancy and Failover

Regulators are taking a closer look at financial institutions’ reliance on a single cloud vendor. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) both highlight the dangers of concentration risk, urging banks to adopt strategies that ensure operational continuity. Multi-cloud spreads risk across multiple providers, preventing a situation where one provider’s failure leads to an industry-wide payments outage. It also gives institutions greater flexibility and bargaining power, ensuring they are not locked into a single vendor’s infrastructure.

Scalability and Performance Under Pressure

Global payments volumes are rising fast. In Europe alone, instant payments are projected to grow from 12% to 45% of total credit transfers by 2027. Banks need an infrastructure that scales dynamically to meet surges in demand—whether it’s peak holiday shopping periods or financial year-end processing spikes. With a multi-cloud approach, institutions can dynamically allocate computing power across different providers, ensuring they maintain high-speed processing even during volume spikes.

Redundancy and Failover

Scalability and Performance Under Pressure

Key considerations in the race to multi-cloud

Multi-cloud architecture

It is essential to understand the challenges that exist while creating a robust multi-cloud architecture. You need to incorporate the right set of tools and technologies to support workload placement across diverse platforms and services. A solid operating model to effectively manage multi-cloud use is imperative – breaking it down into process security, technology, financial operations and people and skills. One of the keys is aligning IT service management with your multi-cloud operating model – implementing the right technology to effectively operate, manage, monitor and secure resources and services among providers – from data management, governance and security to vendor licenses, contracts and more.

Resilience

Establishing resilience in a multi-cloud environment is critical to disruption prevention and recovery. You need a rapid, flexible and scalable environment that provides both zonal and regional resilience. You should also factor in the essential need for an appropriate recovery-time objective (RTO) and recovery-point objective (RPO) to help ensure they do not break down when a service spans multiple clouds.

Security

Leading businesses are recognising the need to design and implement a modern multi-cloud security model across applications and data governance, one featuring a common access-control model across platforms. This includes automation of key capabilities such as identity and access management, as well as automation of compliance for continuous monitoring, reporting and testing of capabilities. Periodic testing is no longer sufficient as threats soar in frequency, impact and cost to the organisation. Automation also offers revolutionary new capabilities to predict trouble before it strikes in today’s bold new reality.

Cost optimisation

Businesses need to rethink budget planning and financial control as the pace of change accelerates. For multi-cloud, you need to invest in new cost management and visibility tools that can establish and maintain centralised governance and avoid cost overruns. Amid different pricing models and various mechanisms to control costs among diverse cloud service providers, balancing the value of workloads with associated cloud costs is essential. Ask yourself what the total cost of hosting an application is. Is it going down or up – and what can you do to drive it down? Can the business reduce some of the variability that exists in current costs?

From Cloud to Multicloud: A Pathway to Resilience

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The future of payments is multi-cloud

The shift to multi-cloud isn’t just about mitigating risk, it’s about preparing for the future of payments infrastructure.

Several key trends are accelerating this shift:

 Stronger regulatory mandates – Compliance frameworks like DORA and the FCA’s operational resilience rules are pushing banks toward multi-cloud adoption.

The rise of real-time payments – As instant payments become the norm, infrastructure must be always-on, highly scalable, and failure-resistant.

Advancements in AI and security – Multi-cloud enables institutions to leverage best-in-class AI-driven fraud detection across cloud environments.

Financial institutions that embrace multi-cloud resilience today will be well-positioned for a future where payments must be instant, secure, and continuously available.

For financial institutions looking to adopt multi-cloud, the key question is: build or partner? Maintaining a complex multi-cloud infrastructure in-house is a massive undertaking, requiring ongoing management, orchestration, and compliance oversight.

A fully managed multi-cloud solution offers a more efficient, scalable, and secure approach. By distributing payments processing across multiple cloud providers, financial institutions can:

Reduce concentration risk and ensure compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.

Guarantee uninterrupted payment processing, even in the face of cloud provider outages.

Scale seamlessly to accommodate growing payment volumes without infrastructure constraints.

By taking the complexity out of multi-cloud adoption, a managed approach allows banks to focus on innovation, growth, and customer experience, rather than IT infrastructure challenges.

Conclusion

Multi-cloud adoption is taking off—and for good reason. Organisations stand to benefit on multiple fronts by making the move to multi-vendor deployments. A multi-cloud strategy isn’t just about preventing outages; it’s about future-proofing payments for an era of real-time transactions and increasing regulatory scrutiny.

While some institutions may continue to build their infrastructure on a single-cloud approach,  reliance on this does pose a significant risk. Those that embrace multi-cloud resilience will have a competitive edge, ensuring payments remain secure, scalable, and always available.