The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has issued a call for a systems integrator to assist with a modernisation of its core IT infrastructure.
In a request for proposal published on 14 February 2024, the authority said it is moving ahead with the modernisation “to mitigate risks associated with end-of-life and obsolete technology” at its core infrastructure sites in Sydney.
RBA’s current infrastructure features physical and virtual systems, including over 420 physical servers running multiple Windows and RHEL virtual instances, 7.7 petabytes of storage, over 700 Cisco physical and logical devices, and 300 physical and logical network related devices.
Core infrastructure services that ensure functionality, management and connectivity within the bank’s IT environment include DNS, AD, NTP, RAS, IAM, DS, DHCP, PKI, back-up, and RS, monitoring, alerting and archive services.
The infrastructure overhaul needs to support RBA’s core technology services over the next five years and mitigate the operational risk associated with the refurbishment of its national headquarters at 65 Martin Place, Sydney.
RBA expects the contract to be executed by May 2024 and the program of work to run from June 2024 to June 2025.
The systems integrator will be required to:
- Implement an IT infrastructure platform and engineer core infrastructure services to deliver performance, security, availability, reliability, capacity, operability, resilience, recoverability and visibility at levels no less than current levels.
- Use the features and functionality of the modernised core infrastructure, such as adoption of ACI policy-based solutions, use of infrastructure as code and uplift infrastructure monitoring, to improve resilience, security and observability.
- Ensure compliance to relevant regulatory and industry standards.
- Prepare a bill of materials for any additional infrastructure equipment or software required to implement not already procured by RBA.
- Develop or update core infrastructure operations and procedure manuals, systems management and technical documents, as well as training and reference material.
- Provide post-implementation hyper-care for three months, with an option to extend for a further 3 months.
Respondents must have prior experience in successfully executing a similar project and hold relevant accreditations from vendors including Cisco, F5, Hitachi, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware.
The request for proposal closes on 22 March 2024.