RBA pushes first IaaS workload into Azure

The Reserve Bank of Australia pushed its first infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) workload into Microsoft Azure with the completion of its ‘data bunker’ earlier this year.

In June 2020, the central bank revealed plans to establish the data bunker in a separate location to its primary Sydney data centre to enhance resilience in the event of data corruption or loss.

It followed a rare data centre outage in 2018 that took down the country’s high-value settlement system, known as the Reserve Bank information and transfer system (RITS), for three hours.

The impact of the outage was widespread, with Services Australia, which uses the RBA as its transactional bank, almost forced to delay welfare payments.

In order to prevent a repeat, the data bunker was conceived, to house standby online replicas and offline backups of data for a selected set of designated Reserve Bank services.

By March 2021, the RBA had entered contracts with Canberra Data Centres for the “co-located data bunker facility”, and with NTT and Oracle for hardware.

Now, following a year-long staged migration, the RBA has completed the project, having moved its last systems to the data bunker in March 2022.

“The first production workload in the data bunker was onboarded in October 2021,” a spokesperson told iTnews.

“Following that, the bank undertook staged migration and testing of the remaining systems with the data backup for the final system being completed in March 2022.”

According to the spokesperson, the “data bunker was the bank’s first IaaS workload in the cloud and the first time it has consumed services in the Australian government region of Azure”.

The RBA previously had public cloud tenancies in Azure and AWS, but these were not deemed suitable for the “broader adoption of the cloud services … including transactional processing”.

“The bank will continue to evaluate opportunities to exploit the benefits of the IaaS services,” the spokesperson added.

In a LinkedIn post earlier this month, the RBA said that “establishing the data bunker in a geographically disparate location further strengthens the bank’s ability to maintain critical services”.

“The bunker has also provided an opportunity to uplift key technology infrastructure and tools within the bank, including the expansion of our secure public cloud footprint with the ability to scale quickly to meet future requirements”, it said.

Chief information officer Stephen Smith added that “as well as strengthening the resilience of the bank’s technology services, the data bunker has broadened the adoption of secure public cloud”.

“We are really proud of our team who have worked so hard to deliver this outcome,” he said.