Data Center Migration

Why is this data center migration taking place?

As part of gateway’s commitment to world-class data center operations and infrastructure, this data center migration will allow the Payments Gateway to benefit from the significant investments made to infrastructure, security and processing capacity in the new environment. In addition, consolidating data centers will enable gateway to provide greater stability and control over the data center environment including procedures, updates, enhanced security monitoring and service availability.

How do you plan to communicate these changes?

Gateway will ensure that customers are kept updated on the progress of this data center migration with regular email updates, which will include details of any changes you will be required to make to target the new environment. In addition, supplementary information is available on the Open Payment Platform Payments Gateway developer portal and knowledge base sites.

How much effort is required from my organization and our merchants?

The effort required for this migration will depend on the method you use to connect to the Open Payment Platform Payments Gateway. For customers needing to whitelist the new IP range, the gateway estimate would be around an hour. If hard-coded IPs are used, these will also need to be changed, which will add to the effort required. For customers requiring the setup of new VPN connections, the effort likely to be significantly more (~20h).

How will the data center migration impact my organization and our merchants?

The actual Data Center migration will have no impact on customers, and all changes will be fully transparent to you and your merchants. Prior to the Data Center migration as preparation, all customers will only need to whitelist the new IP range. Customers should not remove existing IPs prior to the actual Data Center migration. No further efforts are required.

What is the timeline for this migration?

The migration will follow a phased approach by environment, and will include customer testing prior to the migration of production and disaster recovery (DR) systems. No impact to services is expected as part of this migration. The dates for the migration of each environment are available below:

Environment	Migration Date
LIM DR (Disaster Recovery)	6/28/17
EU2 Production	7/20/17
LIM UAT (testing)	10/15/18

What is the strategy for the migration itself?

There will be an overlap period, where the old and the new IP addresses will work. This is being done as a safety net to ensure customer traffic continues to process even if the changes are not made prior to the migration date.

In addition we will make sure that customer traffic is routed to the actual live data center in the background, so that neither you nor your merchants need to take any action. Of course it will be much better not to rely on the overlap.

How long will the migration take?

The migration itself will take several hours. While the migration is taking place, gateway will ensure that customer traffic continues to process successfully, and all traffic will be routed to the new data center environment, no matter if transactions are sent to the ‘old’ or ‘new’ IPs.

What is the rollback plan?

As the old data center will remain active during the migration window and beyond, gateway will be able to roll back to the old environment at any time if necessary. Existing IPs should not be removed from your whitelists until you receive notification from the gateway that old IPs can be removed safely. This will be around 30 days after the migration of the production environment, and is a necessary precaution to ensure you can continue to connect to the old environment in the unlikely event the migration is rolled back.

Which IPs do I/my customers need to whitelist?

The IP ranges to whitelist for inbound and outbound traffic are as follows:

London Production: 185.147.174.128/25

Limerick Disaster Recovery: 185.147.172.128/25

Stage: 185.147.172.64/26 (Limerick)

Why do I need to enable inbound IPs

The payment gateway has multiple workflows reporting back result on payments particular in asynchronous workflows e.g. when using webhooks or alternative payment methods.

What is an IP Range?

An IP range uses a subnet to describe a list of IPs in short notation. Your network operations experts will be aware of this notation and what it means.

What are my options if I don't want to whitelist the above mentioned whole IP ranges provided?

The full IP range covers all services and applications that we provide. However, if you do not wish to whitelist the entire range, we can work with you to provide on the applicable IP addresses for your services.

By whitelisting the entire range, you will future proof your integration in case we need to move IP addresses in future for certain applications.

What if my organization is not able to make the required changes in the agreed timeline?

While the ‘old’ IPs will continue to work for a short time after the data center migration has taken place, this is only a temporary measure. If you do not make the required changes, your organization and your merchants will not be able to process transactions once the forwarding from the old environment to the new environment is removed, as the new data center IPs may end up being blocked by the firewalls of you or your merchants. For this reason, it is essential to whitelist the new IP ranges on the firewalls for your organization and merchants in preparation for the actual Data Center migration.

Do my merchants need to change anything in their frontend integration, or whitelist new IPs?

The majority of merchants should not be required to make any changes to frontend integrations. However, if a merchant did not follow the integration guides and targets a fixed IP address rather than a URL, then it is possible they will need to update that IP address in their integration. Merchants are unlikely to need to whitelist IPs, but if the merchant requires whitelisting for outbound traffic then they will need to whitelist our new IP range.