AWS re:Invent 2025 - Modernizing Global Payment Processing: Moving from Mainframe to AWS (SPS312)

Modernizing Global Payment Processing: Moving from Mainframe to AWS

Global Payments Overview

• Global Payments is the #1 issuer processor in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, and China
• They process over 75 billion transactions annually, with 35+ billion from their issuing organization
• Global Payments operates across 100+ countries, handling the full lifecycle of payment processing

Modernization Goals and Approach

• Global Payments wanted to modernize their payment processing systems to achieve:
  • Speed to market
  • Comfort and confidence for their customers in the cloud migration
• They established a uniform control plan and chose AWS as a preferred cloud partner

Legacy Mainframe Authorization Platform

• Global Payments' flagship authorization platform processes 3.6+ billion transactions monthly for 100+ clients
• This high-throughput, low-latency system is mission-critical, requiring sub-millisecond response times
• The authorization process involves 30+ checkpoints to ensure security, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance

Cloud-based Authorization Platform

• Key goals for the modernized platform:
  • Auto-scaling and resilient architecture with multi-region deployment and high availability
  • Strong security with tokenization, zoning, and support for multiple geographies and regulatory environments
  • SaaS enablement with real-time configuration management and a marketplace of plug-in solutions
• Achieved 5,000+ transactions per second with <200ms latency

Unified Operations Partnership with AWS

• Global Payments engaged with AWS Unified Operations to ensure a successful migration and ongoing operations
• Key aspects of the partnership:
  • Proactive guidance and architecture reviews to identify potential failure modes and design the optimal solution
  • Alarm and observability configuration to detect issues early and enable rapid response
  • Collaborative incident response planning and testing to ensure resilience
  • Ongoing support for planned events (e.g., zero-downtime upgrades) and unplanned incidents

Results and Benefits

• Successful EKS cluster upgrades with no production impact or downtime
• Reduced incident resolution time from 9 hours to 10 minutes through improved observability and joint response planning
• Continuous improvement through blameless post-incident reviews and implementation of automated mitigations
• Improved team efficiency, customer experience, and overall risk management

Business Impact

• Global Payments' mission-critical payment processing systems are now running reliably on AWS, enabling:
  • Uninterrupted service for millions of credit and debit card transactions worldwide
  • Confidence and trust for Global Payments' clients in the cloud migration
  • Scalability and agility to handle peak transaction volumes (e.g., 1.5 billion transactions processed in a single day)