Absolute availability for payment processing

Technology solutions and people resources integrator, Intuate Group, recently completed the implementation of Stratus Fault Tolerant Servers (ftServers) and Thales security appliances at a local clothing, footwear and textiles (CFT) retailing group. In particular, this implementation served as a platform upgrade to the group's critical card payment-routing Postilion software.

Says David Jones, executive at Intuate Group: "The newer technology was not only easy to deploy, but immediately added the expected increase in efficiency levels to the environment. Ongoing management thereof is also hassle-free."

Jones continues: "When it comes to the routing and clearing of card payments, any downtime will adversely affect a company's ability to service a customer and thus negatively impact upon its cash flow. The installation of the Stratus ftServers ensures that our customer experiences absolute availability - 99.999% uptime in fact - for the routing of all card payments to and from banks from the various stores across the country. In addition, the Stratus Always-On methodology provides the appropriate level of trustworthiness for best-in-class organisations where continuity in business is paramount."

The group also opted for the roll-out of the Thales security appliances to deliver the requisite card payment encryption tunnel. These security appliances provide a tamper-proof environment for secure cryptographic processing, key protection and key management and are reliable, secure and highly efficient from a throughput perspective.