China-based payments solution provider gains high performance and a pathway to Asia-Pacific expansion by migrating to MySQL HeatWave for OLTP.
Introduction & Background
Sinopay (Shenzhen) Technology Services Co., Ltd. (Sinopay) is a Chinese company that develops payment card industry solutions and services. The solutions it offers for reducing online transaction risk include global payment gateways, website compliance, anti-fraud management, and dispute prevention.
Sinopay’s customers include payment companies, domestic and overseas banks, financial services companies, and merchants involved with cross-border e-commerce, gaming, and other business activities.
Sinopay supports all bank card brands, is affiliated with leading credit cards, clearing, and payments associations, and has developed customized solutions for the hospitality industry. Its solutions comply with Payment Card Industry 3D Core Security Standard (PCI-3DS) and all data exchanges use 256-bit SSL encryption.
Business Challenges & Goals
When Sinopay entered business operations, its client base was mainly inside China. The organization chose MySQL Community Edition as its backend database running in a local data center.
As business grew and an increasing number of customers began operating overseas, it began to experience a lack of performance.
Sinopay then decided to move its solutions to a cloud platform provider and selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with MySQL HeatWave for OLTP.
Business Results & Metrics
Migrating its database and servers to OCI has equipped Sinopay with a High Availability (HA) platform that empowers its global payment gateways through which customer transactions are submitted to banking networks for authorization, settlement, and reporting.
In the world of payments processing—where fraud, theft, data breaches, and other threats can plague businesses and consumers—security is of critical importance. Sinopay makes full use of OCI’s security features, such as Transparent Data Encryption, Transparent Application Failover, Identity and Access Management, and Web Application Firewall. Combined with MySQL HeatWave for OLTP, Sinopay has maximized the uptime and security of the company’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
Where previously the company had limited backup capabilities, today OCI’s Recovery Service provides automatic failover to a standby database to guarantee continuous operations in case of any primary instance failure.
Daily automatic backup means that Sinopay’s DevOps staff can consult transactions and logs whenever required, while OCI Vault stores and manages encryption keys used to further protect data.
In addition, with Sinopay’s systems hosted in the availability domain of the Oracle Cloud region in Seoul, Korea, any failure is immediately resolved by other availability domains connected by a low latency, high bandwidth network.
The switch to OCI has relieved Sinopay of many manual and time-consuming tasks, for example monitoring database performance and making fixes. Engineers can rapidly identify MySQL HeatWave database queries that are running slowly and address the root cause. The automation of monitoring and load balancing has enabled staff to focus entirely on product development.
Sinopay is pleased with the proactive help provided by the MySQL Support team, which provides a fast response rate and willingness to make recommendations.
Why MySQL HeatWave
When looking at cloud requirements for expansion, Sinopay needed to choose an overseas cloud service provider.
The choice of Oracle Cloud was based on knowledge and use of the MySQL database along with OCI’s strong security, compliance and HA features, all dovetailing with Sinopay’s requirements.
Sinopay in 2021 became an Oracle Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Silver Partner, using MySQL database in its solutions for the handling of payment transactions.
Next Steps
Sinopay’s forward-looking business strategy is to focus on overseas cross-border payment markets, expanding initially in Asia Pacific into Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia—and, at a later date, to North America. Oracle Cloud Regions spanning all geographies are a perfect fit for Sinopay’s global expansion.
At the same time, to bolster business in China, the company hopes that Oracle will establish a cloud region on the mainland.
Sinopay’s roadmap also includes use of the analytical capabilities of MySQL HeatWave’s high-performance in-memory query accelerator to take advantage of Big Data analytics and offer additional value to its customers.