BankWest has a signed $2.5 million contract to outsource network monitoring for more than 1500 devices over two years.

The deal will reduce network problems over the BankWest and St Andrew's networks which connect 200 sites across Australia. Monitoring of routers, switches, WAN accelerators, firewalls and content switches will be outsourced and covered by a new quality of service agreement.

BankWest has more than 5000 staff and operates a Telstra multi-protocol label switching network with Cisco routers and switches, and Riverbed WAN accelerators.

BankWest networks telecommunications and data centre facilities senior manager Adrian Cowman said the network is built for high availability and resilience and has dual routers, switches and Telstra services at each site.

“[Network monitoring] was outsourced as BankWest wanted to draw on the resources and expertise of an external organisation rather than build internal capabilities during a period of business expansion and significant infrastructure changes.” Cowman said.

“This contract reflects an increasing drive to monitor, enhance and protect the technology platform that underpin our entire operation.”

The contract was handed to local IT services company IMC after a tender process which attracted five “leading service providers”. IMC were the incumbent provider for six months prior to the tender.

Monitoring will be handled from IMC's Sydney data centre on dedicated virtualised servers with external disaster recovery, using the company's Netactive toolset.