The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is set to decommission its head office data center in Sydney and relocate to a colocation facility.

In addition to the decommission and relocation, RBA's other data centers will get all-new core infrastructure and the Bank will migrate all of its applications and workloads to that core.

The entire process is expected to take around three years, according to a Tender.

The tender states: “The CIM program establishes a new colocation data center, designs and deploys new core infrastructure to all of the bank’s data centers, migrates the bank’s application workloads to the new core infrastructure (both within data centers and between data centers) and decommissions the HO [head office] data center.”

“The timeline for the CIM Program addresses and accommodates the key dependencies associated with end-of-life issues with the current core infrastructure, and the head office 65 Martin Place (65MP, Sydney, New South Wales) workplace construction program. The timeline for this project is reasonably tight.”

The tender was published in December 2023, and is set to close on February 2, 2024. It is expected that the CIM program will take until mid-2027 to complete.

The motivation behind decommissioning the head office data center is that it was previously identified in a Deloitte review as a resiliency risk to the company as other upgrade works were being conducted at the site.

The report cited a previous incident: "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.

Other financial institutions are exploring cloud computing solutions. In September 2022 DCD reported that Lloyds Banking Group would close its Copley data center following several years of cloud contracts being signed with the likes of Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM. Similarly, Finland's Savings Bank Group migrated to Microsoft Azure in August 2023, and the Bank of Africa UK to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in March 2023.