Secure Cloud Computing with a Virtualized Network Infrastructure

Despite the rapid development in the field of cloud computing, security is still one of the major hurdles to cloud computing adoption. Most cloud services (e.g. Amazon EC2) are offered at low cost without much protection to users. At the other end of the spectrum, highly secured cloud services (e.g. Google “government cloud”) are offered at much higher cost by using isolated hardware, facility, and administrators with security clearance. In this paper, we explore the “middle ground”, where users can still share physical hardware resource, but user networks are isolated and accesses are controlled in the way similar to that in enterprise networks. We believe this covers the need for most enterprise and individual users. We propose an architecture that takes advantage of network virtualization and centralized controller. This architecture overcomes scalability limitations of prior solutions based on VLANs, and enables users to customize security policy settings the same way they control their on-site network.