An SDN/NFV-Enabled Enterprise Network Architecture Offering Fine-Grained Security Policy Enforcement

In recent years, the number of attacks and threat vectors against enterprise networks have been constantly increasing in numbers and variety. Despite these attacks, the main security systems, for example network firewalls, have remained rather unchanged. In addition, new challenges arise not only to the level of provided security, but also to the scalability and manageability of the deployed countermeasures such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Due to the tight integration into the physical network's infrastructure, a dynamic resource allocation to adapt the security measures to the current network conditions is a difficult undertaking. This article covers different architectural design patterns for the integration of SDN/NFV-based security solutions into enterprise networks.