RBA launches core modernisation design phase

The Reserve Bank of Australia is looking for designs that will form the basis of its core infrastructure modernisation (CIM) program.

The RBA this week published an approach to market for a consultant to validate technology designs, and prepare an “overall infrastructure solution design” that’s aligned with the bank’s current technology stack, so its core infrastructure and applications operate with a minimum of interruption.

The modernisation was first flagged in December 2023, including a new co-located data centre and decommissioning of the existing head office data centre, along with designing the new core infrastructure and migrating the current workloads to the new core.

The documents accompanying the latest approach to market show the scale of the challenge facing the designer of the new core.

“All customer applications”, as well as all core infrastructure services, will have to at least match today’s capabilities, in performance, resilience, availability, and security.

A modernised core should have the features needed to deliver “resilience, security and observability”.

The document notes that some of its current core infrastructure is “end-of-life and obsolete”.

The RBA’s current environment currently includes more than 420 physical servers running Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines; 7.7 PB of storage, more than 700 physical and logical Cisco devices, and 300 other networking units for functions like load balancing.

Systems are also needed to deliver services such as DNS, Active Directory, Network Time Protocol, remote access, identity and access management, DHCP, PKI, backup and restoration, monitoring and alerting, and archive services.

The approach to market envisages the design process to begin in June 2024.

The modernisation program was triggered by a Deloitte review into a November 2022 outage caused by a failed software upgrade.