SP.LINKS Migrates e-SCOTT Smart Online Payment Frontend to AWS, Boosting Processing Capacity and Reducing PCI DSS Compliance Burden

SP.LINKS offers diverse payment methods to businesses that require payment methods for ecommerce sites and online stores. Launched in 1998, the company’s e-SCOTT credit card payment service connects directly to each credit card company, providing stable and fast payment processing with minimal risk of failure. While e-SCOTT initially only had a payment function, it was later upgraded to e-SCOTT Smart with added functions such as a management screen and sales data reporting. Other payment services have been added since then.

“The direct connection to credit card companies makes our payment system unique,” says Koichi Iguchi, executive officer and head of the IT Division at SP.LINKS. “In addition to speed and stability, we also provide anti-fraud services. Authentication Assist Service is our unique, powerful anti-fraud solution that is realized by cooperating with each credit card company to match attribute information for payment processing with customer databases.”

Recently, demands for payment service providers have increased with the expansion of ecommerce payments. Additionally, today’s customers expect the same smart payment experience as they do at online stores when making payments physically. For example, a customer might reserve a taxi with his or her smartphone and register the payment method in advance, with payment completed automatically upon arrival at the destination. SP.LINKS is focusing on these modern in-person payments and is working to enhance its services to meet this demand.

As more payment methods are provided, payment services increasingly require stability and availability. With a rapid increase in the number of payments processed, the company has been struggling to cope with the increased burden on conventional on-premises systems.

“For example, when concert tickets for a popular artist went on sale, causing a sharp traffic spike, buyers trying to purchase were sometimes delayed at the payment stage,” says Takamitsu Kamei, head of the System Planning Section, System Development Department and senior manager of the IT Division at SP.LINKS. “We try our best not to cause any inconvenience to our clients, resulting in heavy lifting. Our clients have adopted the cloud for their ecommerce sites to process more traffic in a short period of time, making it challenging to predict peak load requirements. Therefore, to increase processing capacity as well as availability and flexibility, we started thinking about a next-generation system based on the idea of using the cloud.”

To migrate the most important payment service system to the cloud, SP.LINKS selected AWS, which was already used by Sony group companies. From around 2018, SP.LINKS started building other internal services on AWS to accumulate knowledge and experience before beginning the project to launch a frontend system that would directly accept requests from customers on e-SCOTT Smart, such as sending and receiving payment messages, aimed at a launch in 2022.

“The frontend system provides various payment methods, such as credit cards, convenience store payments, online payment gateways, QR and bar code payments, mobile carrier billing, and electronic money payments,” says Yuji Maeyama, head of the System Development Department in the IT Division at SP.LINKS. “The existing monolithic on-premises environment meant that any issues impacted all payment methods. With a modern configuration that uses AWS or container technology, each payment method can be separated to increase availability, and it is possible to balance cost and performance by controlling resource allocation according to the frequency of payments.”

Migrating the frontend system was a major challenge because it is the core of the business and handles 3 million transactions from 30,000 merchants per day. “We received a wide range of advice from the AWS Account Team covering everything from the proof of concept to implementation, operation, and future plans, including suggestions for migration plans for the next-generation system and ways to optimize costs,” says Nobuo Koike, head of the System Management Department in the IT Division at SP.LINKS. “We have also benefited from enterprise support. The AWS Support Technical Account Manager and the team collaborated alongside AWS staff in the United States to provide detailed support. Before getting deeply involved, we had the impression that AWS was a poker-faced company, but the team was incredibly warm and friendly, putting us at ease throughout the project.”

SP.LINKS used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which is a managed migration and replication service, for migrating particularly important databases to Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. “Our previous database migration required advanced skills and experts due to environmental dependencies, resulting in high costs,” says Maeyama. “However, migrating to Amazon Aurora was easy because it’s browser based, permissions were easy to adjust, and there was no need for expertise specific to migration tools.” 

Koike, who leads the operation, says, “The ability to scale resources in the cloud, which was impossible on premises, has cut costs to a fraction of the original cost. Other advantages include the ease of deploying and expanding the environment horizontally and the capability to build an independent system for a client who requires special processing.”

“AWS services are compliant with PCI DSS. Because AWS appropriately handles strictly defined system configurations and operations, our burden is drastically reduced,” says Kamei. “We are running many containers on AWS. If we were to reproduce this on premises, vulnerability management and patch management of operating systems and middleware would become a huge burden. By using PCI DSS compliant services from AWS, we’ve been able to significantly reduce costs.”

Going forward, SP.LINKS intends to focus on strengthening its organizational structure and nurturing human resources in order to increase the speed and flexibility of development on AWS and to promote in-house production. The company also has ambitions regarding further cloud use and modernization and is driving the migration of existing on-premises systems to AWS.

“Since payment services are already a part of the public infrastructure, we’re doing everything we can to enhance stability and safety,” says Iguchi. “AWS services are stable and can be used with peace of mind, and we have also learned that strong security services, such as distributed denial of service countermeasures, lead to the enhancement of payment services.” Measures to enhance serviceability by using AWS are also underway, such as adopting AWS PrivateLink, which lets users establish connectivity between virtual private clouds and AWS services without exposing data to the internet, and providing APIs with excellent development efficiency. “We want AWS to continue supporting our business in various ways and contributing to the creation of better services,” says Iguchi.