Is Visa being overly cautious? Why or why not? 2. Why is this level of managerial controls necessary? 3. Which controls would be more important to Visa: feedforward, concurrent, or feedback? Explain. 4. What other managerial controls might be useful to the company? Top Secret "Prisons are easier to enter than Visa's top-secret Operations Center East (OCE), its biggest, newest and most advanced U.S. data center."83 And Rick Knight, senior vice president at Visa and formerly the head of global operations and engineering, is responsible for its security and functioning. Why all the precautions? Because Visa acknowledges that (1) hackers are increasingly savvy, (2) data is an increasingly desirable black-market commodity, and (3) the best way to keep itself safe is with an information network in a fortress that instantly responds to threats. Prisons are easier to enter than Visa's OCE! In a year's time, Visa processes more than 91.6 billion retail electronic payments from around the globe. And every day, Visa's system connects up to 2.2 billion debit and credit cards, millions of acceptance locations, 2.1 million ATMs, and 14 400 financial institutions.84 Visa, which completes an annual "stress test" of its system in preparation for the holiday season, at one point processed a peak volume of 56 000 messages per second.85 (Do some math on that and be amazed!) So what seems to us a simple swipe of a card or keying in our card numbers on an online transaction actually triggers a robust set of activities, including the basic sales transaction processing, risk management, and information-based services. That's why OCE's workers have two jobs: "Keep hackers out, and keep the network up, no matter what." And that's why Visa doesn't reveal the location of OCEon the eastern seaboard is as specific as the description gets. Beneath the road leading to the OCE, hydraulic posts can rise up fast enough to stop a car going 80 kilometres per hour. And a car won't be able to go that fast or it will miss a "vicious hairpin turn" and drive off into a drainage pond. Back in medieval days, that would have been known as the castle moat, which was also designed as protection. There are also hundreds of security cameras and a superb security team of former military personnel. If you're lucky enough to be invited as a guest to OCE (which few people are), you'll have your photo taken and right index fingerprint encoded on a badge. Then you're locked into a "mantrap portal" where you put your badge on a reader that makes sure you are you, and then put it on another reader with your finger on a fingerprint detector. If you make it through, you're clear to enter the network operations centre. With a wall of screens in front of them, each employee sits at a desk with four monitors. In a room behind the main centre, three top-notch security experts keep an eye on things. Knight says that "about 60 incidents a day warrant attention." Although hackers are a primary concern, OCE also worries about network capacity. Right now, maximum capacity is at 56 000 transactions per second. If the network goes over that capacity, the network wouldn't just stop processing one message, it would stop processing all of them. OCE is described as a "Tier-4" centre, which is a certification from a data centre organization. To achieve that certification, every (and yes, we mean every) mainframe, air conditioner, and battery has a backup