Payment insights · Thought Leadership
Building resilience in payments: Why multi-cloud is the future
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:
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 recognizing 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 optimization
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 centralized 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?
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.
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.