The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has selected NTT Australia for the 'design and implementation' of its new IT infrastructure.

According to a tender notice, and first reported by iTNews, the contract is worth AU$12.7 million (US$8.61m) and will cover the period until October 2025.

The contract is part of RBA's CoreMod program, an effort that was revealed at the end of 2023 and has seen RBA 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.

CoreMod is expected to run until mid-to-late 2027. While this "design and implementation phase" will run through 2025, 2026 will see RBA seek help for workload migration to the new infrastructure, while 2027 will see it decommission its current head office data center.

RBA's CoreMod program director Janet Mengel told iTnews: “Following the selection of the new colocation data center and the acquisition of hardware, advancing to the design and implementation phase of the CoreMod program marks a critical milestone. This phase is essential for establishing a future-ready, modern, resilient, and secure infrastructure platform.

“Partnering with a reliable vendor for the design and implementation activities brings us closer to migrating national critical applications to the new infrastructure. This step is pivotal in fulfilling our commitment to providing a robust, safe, and efficient payments system for the Australian people, both now and in the future.”

RBA has made three 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.

NTT Australia is a global technology services company. Through NTT Global Data Centers (NTT GDC) the company owns data centers across the Americas, Asia Pacific, EMEA, and India.

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.

In March 2024, Western Sydney Airport announced that it would be using CDC Data Centres' colocation facility in Sydney for its digital air traffic control tower.