Shift4 Corporation Leads Payment Gateway Industry in Reliability

Payment processing gateways such as $$$ ON THE NET connect merchants’ point-of-sale and property management systems to the banks and processors. Should a gateway be down, customers are unable to receive immediate authorizations through their point-of-sale. Either information has to be kept and run at a later date – leaving the organization open to fraud – or voice referrals must be received. Voice referrals, where the clerk calls into the processor and reads the credit card data over the phone, are time consuming and costly, both in customer satisfaction and transaction costs. The only system downtime that occurred in 2004 was a pre-scheduled 3-hour window during which Shift4 brought live its new state-of-the-art data center. A second data center, with an even larger load capacity, will be brought online later this year, though no downtime will be associated with that go live date. Together, these two, completely redundant data centers will bring Shift4’s system availability close to its ultimate goal of five-nines (99.999% availability), or in laymans terms, less than five and a half minutes of downtime per year.