Virtual Firewall Performance as a Waypoint on a Software Defined Overlay Network

Cloud computing environments face many unique security challenges. Location-based firewalls with static policies require long provisioning times relative to other cloud data center components, and are not well suited to dynamic, virtualized workloads. In this paper, we discuss the use of virtual firewalls facilitated by software defined network overlays with forwarding graphs. Experimental results and performance measurements will be presented using a variety of workloads running over a virtual firewall deployment with an industry standard virtual overlay network.