Top secret Visa data center banks on security

In an era when mobile purchases on smartphones and tablets are expected to grow 73% to $11.6 billion in the U.S. this year, security is a necessary obsession at OCE - and an acknowledgment of the perils posed by profit-minded hackers.

The fortress is home to the facility’s 130 workers

The fortress is home to the facility’s 130 workers, who are entrusted with the arduous task of keeping hackers out and the network up.

To meet such lofty standards, Visa has poured hundreds of millions of dollars annually into developing state-of-the-art risk-management research. VisaNet’s services include transaction risk scoring, data encryption and transaction alerts. It all adds up to highly accurate models to identify and address potential fraudulent deals previously they’re concluded. That has contributed in great part to global fraud rates of just 6 cents per $100 spent, according to Visa.

The popularity of cloud computing

Data centers are increasingly in vogue as demand for digital data explodes with the popularity of cloud computing, tablets and smartphones. Google, Facebook and Apple are among the large tech companies that built their data centers in rural areas to save on land and power.

“Physical security is the foundation where you start,” says John Thielens, chief security officer of Axway, a business-software vendor. “If you can afford it, build a data center. The big guys build their own.”

The same time

At the same time, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others have plunged into the business of managing data centers for corporate customers, says Philip Russom, a technology director for The Data Warehousing Institute. Amazon.com says it offers cloud-based “data centers for rent.”

“The growth in data center construction is very much tied to the growth in the amount of data which needs to be stored and delivered to businesses and consumers,” says Rakesh Shah, director of product marketing and strategy at data-security firm Arbor Networks.

NASA-like command center

A NASA-like command center, with a 40×20-foot wall of screens and 42 firewalls, monitors the company’s worldwide network, which Visa says processes 2,500 transactions per second.

Two pods contain Visa’s core network, a third its corporate networks, and the fourth, development work. A fifth pod handles Visa’s new mobile platforms, just as the recently acquired Fundamo, a mobile financial services platform. Two dormant pods await expansion.

Pods 4 and 5 are the brains of the network, a blur of hard drives spinning and fans whirring amid rows of IBM mainframes, Cisco Systems switches and EMC and Hitachi storage arrays. They’re all connected by 3,000 miles of cable - enough to traverse the country.