Analysis of Overhead Caused by Security Mechanisms in IaaS Cloud

The process of determining the amount of resources needed to deploy applications or services in the cloud and provisioning for these resources is known as cloud capacity planning. Capacity planning is essential for meeting current and future levels of the minimal wastage requirements. Capacity planning can be applied to a company's computer network, storage and security appliances. Security appliances typically accompany most cloud-based deployments. They can be deployed in cloud either by the cloud service provider or the organization itself. This paper intends to evaluate the network overhead caused by client-deployed security mechanisms in cloud services in a fluctuating workload environment. We present in this paper several simulations performed to evaluate firewall architectures with OPNET simulator on a growing number of clients. Finally, we provide recommendations for organizations to assure proper capacity planning for deployment of security mechanisms.