RBL Bank’s new data centre will be capable of processing nearly five times its current transaction volumes, with the underlying architecture designed to support the lender’s technology requirements for the next 10-12 years, Ravi Pichan, chief information officer and head – digital banking said.
“The core architecture has been designed for 10 to 12 years, while the current setup gives us sufficient capacity for the next two to three years,” Pichan said. “We’ve designed it so that scaling beyond that becomes pretty plug and play.”
Navi Mumbai Facility
The new primary data centre is located in Navi Mumbai, and the Chennai facility will continue to serve as the disaster recovery (DR) site. Built on a private cloud architecture, the infrastructure is designed to scale both vertically and horizontally as transaction volumes grow, without the need to build another data centre in the foreseeable future, Pichan said.
The project took around 1.5 years from planning to execution and became operational earlier this year after running for several months. The infrastructure is equipped to handle substantially higher transaction throughput, allowing the bank to support future growth seamlessly. The upgraded platform is expected to deliver uptime of up to 99.99%, supported by near-real-time failover capabilities and a high-availability architecture.
Boosting Payments Infrastructure
On payments infrastructure, he said the bank has not been flagged by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for UPI response times or technical transaction declines. “Our volumes are growing, and the data centre is geared to process 4 to 5X the volumes that we have today,” he said. Customers will also benefit from a over 35% faster application response times, higher transaction success rates and a more consistent banking experience during peak demand.
The lender has also strengthened its cyber resilience through layered security measures, including micro-segmentation, security information and event management (SIEM) tools, a 24×7 security operations centre (SOC), business continuity planning and disaster recovery drills.
Micro-segmentation and a hyper converged infrastructure plays a big role in addressing only the part that gets impacted,” Pichan said, explaining the bank’s approach to overall resilience.
He added that the investment made is intended to support both the bank’s expanding branch network and rising digital transaction volumes. In a statement in March, the bank had said that it opened 23 full-service branches in multiple states taking the total number of branches to 603 across India. The lender plans to open another 200 branches in FY27 to take its network to over 800 branches.