The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has put out a is looking for a migration partner for its ongoing IT modernization project.
It has put out an RFP for a partner to provide the services needed to migrate RBA's legacy IT to its new colocation data center.
The tender is part of RBA's CoreMod (Core Modernization) Program, an effort that was revealed at the end of 2023 and has seen the bank select a CDC Data Centres colocation facility for the new location of its head office data center. The data center contract currently runs until March 2034.
First reported by ARN, the tender for a migration partner seeks to ensure "reliability, scalability, and long-term operational sustainability, while mitigating risks from core infrastructure obsolescence and strengthening the resilience of mission-critical systems.” Those interested in applying will have to create detailed plans for all applications, services, and systems.
The contract is expected to be decided in May 2025 and begin that June. The migration should be completed by December 2026.
In September 2024, the RBA selected NTT Australia for the 'design and implementation' of its new IT infrastructure. Throughout 2024, RBA made three other related procurements with NTT Australia this year: two contracts for Cisco hardware and software totaling AU$67.5 million (US$45.75m), and an AU$16.1 million (US$10.91m) contract for F5 load balancers.
In May 2024, RBA awarded a 'managed services for IT infrastructure' contract valued at AU$13.6 million (US$9.22m) to Hitachi Vantara.
The entire CoreMod program is expected to run until mid-to-late 2027, and covers data center, core modernization, application migration, and data center decommissioning key project streams.
The modernization plan was motivated by incidents at RBA's head office data center.
A report noted: "A physical incident occurred in August 2018, where the Bank experienced a disruption to the power supplying the data center at one of its sites. The power loss abruptly cut off all technology systems operating from that data center, including those supporting RITS (Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System)."
Another incident occurred in October 2022 and hundreds of thousands of payments were delayed by five days when a software update to a virtual server failed.
CDC has data centers in Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, Australia, and two in Auckland, New Zealand. The company acquired land in Sydney for a second campus in May 2023, and broke ground in October 2024.