Network Topology Based Identification and Analysis of Security Threats in Data Centres

Various physical and virtual devices are interconnected and mutually dependent on each other in modern large-scale data centres. Security threats if analysed without considering these relationships can go undetected or their severity is underestimated. This paper proposes a network topology based on the identification and analysis of security threats. The overall threat detection and prevention approach extracts data from various sources to evaluate component level threats. Component level threats are combined, taking into account the network topology to evaluate their propagation risk. The application of the method is demonstrated using an example of the data centre operating the CloudStack cloud platform.