“Most people think of us as a financial institution, but the network is the brand,” says Rick Knight, Visa’s head of global systems operations and engineering. “If it goes down, lives are on the line.”

The command room inside Visa’s Operations Center East, where your last credit-card purchase was scrutinized. | Photo by Melissa Golden

He’s talking

in a briefing room, its walls opaque like any other’s. But with the push of a button, they become

transparent glass, revealing what’s beyond–a NASA-like command center with a 40-by-14-foot wall of

screens, including Visa’s network overlaid on a world map. The network’s vital signs are constantly

tracked, showing, at the moment, 8,000 transaction messages a second.

This is Visa’s OCE, or

Operations Center East, the biggest, newest, and most advanced of its U.S. data centers. It is a

data-security heaven–and Visa’s acknowledgment that hackers are increasingly savvy, that data is

an ever-desirable black-market commodity, and that the best way to keep Visa (and its 150 million

daily transactions) safe is to ensconce its network inside a heavily fortified castle that

instantly responds to threats.

The OCE’s 130 workers have two jobs: Keep hackers out and

keep the network up, no matter what. That’s why rule No. 1 for visitors is: Never reveal its

location. “On the eastern seaboard” is as specific as Visa will allow.

Somewhere On The Eastern Seaboard

Hydraulic bollards lurk beneath the road outside the OCE, which can

rise fast enough to stop an intruding car going 50 miles per hour. If the car exceeds that, it

won’t be able to make a vicious hairpin turn built into the road and will then careen into a

drainage pond, a modern-day moat.

Invited guests who pass the gauntlet have their photo and

right

index fingerprint encoded on a badge. Entering the data center means first passing a “mantrap”

portal. With the doors locked on either

side, you put your badge on a reader that compares it with the real you for a few seconds. Next,

you put

the badge on another reader and then put your finger on a fingerprint detector.

Visa’s Armor Come what may, the OCE has a plan to survive. 1//Out-of-control backhoes!

Four

conduits bring electricity into the building, so if a nearby backhoe takes out one, the Visa

network will keep humming. 2//Electric surges!

Every pod has two

rooms with uninterruptible power supplies to condition the power coming in and make sure there are

no

system-threatening surges. 3//Total blackouts!

Each pod has two

rooms with 1,000 heavy-duty batteries each, enough to turn the pod into the world’s largest laptop

computer for 30 minutes. 4//Natural disasters!

Each pod has two

massive diesel generators, capable of generating 4 megawatts of power. They had to be heavily

soundproofed–

including 3-foot-wide mufflers–so they wouldn’t violate county noise regulations. 5//Anthrax copycats!

Visa’s OCE has no

mail room. Mail goes to a modular building nearby. That way, if a suspicious powder arrives, the

mail room can just be airlifted away. What’s with the wacky pipes? The OCE contains five 1,250-ton chillers that chemically

treat water, preventing corrosion. Then huge bright blue pipes big enough for dog racing take 48-

degree water from the chillers through the rest of the building, keeping the computers cool. Visa’s

electronics run hot enough to raise the water’s temperature by 12 degrees–and evaporate 50,000

gallons a day–before it goes back to the chiller.

The portal leads you into the network-operations center, where workers in business casual

monitor the wall of screens, plus four monitors at their desks. Three Visa security gurus sit in a

room behind the main center. One has Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which might as well be

required reading here. They’re monitoring networks across Visa’s operations, looking for malware,

for odd behavior. Knight says about 60 incidents a day warrant attention.