An architecture to manage performance and reliability on hybrid cloud-based firewalling

Firewalls are the first defense line for the networking services and applications. With the advent of virtualization and Cloud Computing, the explosive growth of network-based services, investigations have emphasized the limitations of conventional firewalls. However, despite of being impressively significant to improve security, cloud-based firewalling approaches still experience severe performance and reliability issues that can lead to non use of these services by companies. Hence, our work presents an efficient architecture to manage performance and reliability on a hybrid cloud-based firewalling service. Being composed of a physical and a virtual part, the architecture follows an approach that supports and complements basic physical firewall functionalities with virtual ones. The architecture was deployed and experimental results show that the proposed approach improve the computational power of traditional firewall with the support of cloud-based firewalling service.