RBA to build ‘data bunker’ to safeguard payments system from outages – Strategy – Cloud – Hardware
The Reserve Financial institution of Australia will create a ‘data bunker’ to enhance the resilience of its main units immediately after a large-profile info centre outage in 2018 pulled the country’s large-worth settlement process offline.
The central lender on Tuesday approached the current market for a process integrator to layout and employ the info bunker to “sequester” or section particular info in a bid to guard the payments process in the celebration of one more outage.
It said “recent activities [experienced] highlighted the hazard of extended outages”, which can originate from the “extended reduction of utilities or other critical expert services to the main info store” or a denial of service attack and other “nefarious actions”.
Facts “not becoming accessible due to corruption of the main info centre store”, which is situated at the bank’s Sydney headquarters, was also identified as a key hazard that threatens the resiliency of chosen business apps.
Whilst outages are a unusual incidence for the lender, an interior electrical power source failure at its headquarters and info centre in August 2018 pulled elements of its critical Reserve Financial institution information and transfer process (RITS) offline for a few hrs.
RITS – a central section of Australia’s payments process – is the country’s large-worth settlement process that banks and other payments organisations use to settle payment obligations amongst every single other.
The circulation on effect of the outage was widespread, with govt organizations like Solutions Australia, which makes use of the RBA as its transactional lender, just about pressured to delay a welfare payments operate.
Keen to avoid a repeat, the RBA expects that the info bunker will “enhance the resiliency of [its] key business technological know-how expert services in the celebration of info reduction or corruption” and, eventually, “improve the resilience of the payment system”.
“The necessity for the provision of ‘continuously available’ and highly available’ externally struggling with technological know-how expert services shipped by the Reserve Financial institution that assist Australia’s payments units highlights the requirement for extended resilience of key expert services,” it said.
The info bunker, which the RBA has started developing and expects will be in procedure by February 2021, is expected to “house standby on the internet replicas and offline backups of info for a chosen set of designated Reserve Financial institution services”.
It will be “physically and logically segregated from other info in the Reserve Financial institution setting and housed in a suitably protected facility for shielded level information”, according to the request for tender.
The RBA expects the actual physical facility will be “independently resilient to disruption” (i.e at the very least a Tier three info centre) and “geographically situated to enable well timed updates to the info in the info bunker”.
It will also have to have to make certain that “the exact interruption to service from either one particular of the Martin Area or Business Resumption Website (BRS) info centres does not impact the info bunker”.
The info is housed in a blend of Oracle Exadata databases and Microsoft SQL databases (quickly to be SQL Server 2019), with both of those supplying “synchronised copies of the info at every single of the Reserve Bank’s Martin Area and BRS info centres”.
The RBA expects that machines internet hosting the Oracle databases will be situated in a colocation info centre sourced from the Digital Transformation Agency’s govt info centre panel, when a shielded-level public cloud will be applied to host the SQL databases.
Whilst the RBA has present public cloud tenancies in Microsoft Azure and AWS, it does not have a protected public cloud occasion that is “suitable for the uses of the info bunker and properly integrated into the enterprise”.
As this kind of, the RBA is banking on utilising the shielded-level cloud service “for broader adoption of the cloud expert services … including transactional processing” and wishes the service created to allow this.
“The protected public cloud founded for the uses of the info bunker will involve more stability and authentication expert services that are to be set up to the extent applicable,” the RBA said.
“The supporting cloud management framework configuration relevant to the chosen cloud tenancy is to be uplifted as appropriate.”
The process integrator will be expected to establish, layout and develop a info bunker solution and its supporting elements that confirms with the RBA’s requirements, as perfectly as assist the banks procedure of the bunker for an first 12 thirty day period time period.
The RBA expects to award a contract to the successful process integrator in November. Submissions to the RFT will near July seventeen, with an market briefing to be held on June 16.
