State Bank completes a Cisco network and software defined data centre, without saying what runs on it

The State Bank of Pakistan has finished a new core banking network and a software defined data centre at its Karachi head office, the foundation under payment systems such as Raast. The central bank marked the completion on Friday 6 November. The project was awarded to Cisco, the American networking company, and Governor Jameel Ahmad, US Chargé d'Affaires Natalie Baker and Cisco Pakistan country general manager Kashif Ul Haque attended.

Officials said engineers from both sides carried out a complex migration without interrupting the central bank's daily operations. The contract is described only as multimillion dollar. Baker called the State Bank's infrastructure a national asset and said the choice of an American supplier shows a commitment to technology quality. The State Bank has not published the cost, the award date or the list of systems that now run on the network.

What software defined means in practice

In a conventional data centre, each switch and firewall is configured one at a time, and the rules about which server may talk to which are scattered across many device settings. In a software defined design, a central controller holds those rules and pushes them to the switches. A policy such as "the settlement application may reach its database and nothing else" is written once and enforced everywhere.

Such designs commonly use a leaf and spine layout, in which every access switch connects to every spine switch, so any two servers are the same number of hops apart and capacity grows by adding switches. The gains are consistent rules, faster changes, a record of who changed what, and finer segmentation, which limits how far an intruder can move after reaching one system.

The price is concentration. The controller becomes a high value target, and a faulty change pushed from it can reach every switch at once. In most designs the switches keep forwarding traffic if the controller goes down, but nobody can change policy until it returns. Banks usually answer with tight control over administrator accounts, staged rollouts and a tested way back. These are the questions the design raises, not findings about how the State Bank has set it up.

Moving a central bank's network without downtime normally means building the new fabric beside the old one, linking the two, and moving systems across in groups, each with a rollback. The old and new designs then coexist for months, and that overlap is when the rollback plan is most likely to be tested.

The load it has to carry

A Finance Ministry document submitted to the National Assembly, reported by ProPakistani on 16 October, counted 11.9 billion digital transactions in the year to June 2026, up from a baseline of 6.9 billion, a rise of 72 percent (11.9 divided by 6.9). A year has about 31.5 million seconds, so 11.9 billion transactions is an average of about 377 a second across every digital channel in the country. Averages hide peaks, and salary days can run several times higher.

Only part of that traffic passes through systems the State Bank operates, but the State Bank runs Raast, the instant payment system whose share keeps growing. The Prime Minister ordered on the day of the ceremony that cheque payments from Asaan Assignment Accounts stop on 15 November and move to Raast from 16 November. Government payments that used to clear over several days will arrive as instant instructions.

Who gains and what can go wrong

The State Bank gains an architecture that can be segmented and automated. Banks and wallets that depend on its payment systems gain only if the new network keeps availability at least as high as the old one. Anyone paid from government accounts depends on the same systems from 16 November.

The risks are ordinary ones for any estate built on one vendor. Network equipment needs security fixes on a regular schedule, and a payments operator has to apply them quickly without taking the system down. A software defined fabric adds the controller to that list, so its patch cycle matters as much as the switches' does.

The first live test is 16 November, when the cheque cut off ends and Raast begins to carry payments from Asaan Assignment Accounts.