The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) new data centre complex in Bhubaneswar will strengthen the resilience of the country’s financial system and improve the uptime of critical services, including payment systems and government banking operations, Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Sunday.
The Rs 169 crore facility was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier in the day.
The data centre has the highest Tier-IV accreditation from the Uptime Institute and will operate independent of third party cloud service providers, Malhotra said in an interview with DD India.
“For a central bank of a country, IT (information technology) no longer is a support function. It is a very core function, because it is from where all our applications for the general public, for our own use and for consumers, run,” he said.
The RBI’s payment systems, including the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) and Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), operate round the clock. While the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the final settlement takes place through the regulator’s data centres and applications, Malhotra said.
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Other critical applications, including the e-Kuber platform used by the Centre, state governments and banks, and the RBI’s integrated ombudsman system, will also run on the infrastructure. Applications relating to licences and approvals sought by entities regulated by the central bank will also be hosted at the facility.
The complex will have four independent data centres. The RBI has also applied for a platinum rating from the Indian Green Building Council, which would recognise the facility’s energy and water efficiency standards.
The project also houses a cyber security training institute, with two-thirds of the land allocated to the institute and one-third to the data centre.
It will train RBI personnel, bank employees and staff of other financial sector organisations in emerging technologies and cyber security, including artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, quantum technology and blockchain. It will also undertake research to help strengthen the security and efficiency of financial systems, Malhotra said.
“Cyber security is increasingly becoming important, especially in the wake of AI,” he said, adding that the institute would focus on keeping personnel abreast of the latest technological developments.
Explaining the choice of location, the Governor said the RBI’s three existing data centres were located in Maharashtra. Bhubaneswar offered geographical separation and was situated in a different seismic zone, providing an additional layer of resilience against localised disruptions. The availability of talent in the region was another factor behind the choice, he said.