Analysis of Network Segmentation Techniques in Cloud Data Centers

Cloud Data centers are predominantly made up of Virtualized hosts. The networking infrastructure in a cloud (virtualized) data center, therefore, consists of the combination of physical IP network (data center fabric) and the virtual network residing in virtualized hosts. Network Segmentation... See full abstract

Cloud Data centers are predominantly made up of Virtualized hosts. The networking infrastructure in a cloud (virtualized) data center, therefore, consists of the combination of physical IP network (data center fabric) and the virtual network residing in virtualized hosts. Network Segmentation (Isolation), Traffic flow control using firewalls and IDS/IPS form the primary network-based security techniques with the first one as the foundation for the other two. In this paper, we describe and analyze three generations of network segmentation techniques--Virtual Switches & Physical NIC-based, VLAN-based & Overlay-based. We take a detailed look at the overlay-based virtual network segmentation and its characteristics such as scalability and ease of configuration.
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