Rapid migration of VMs on a datacenter under cyber attack over optical infrastructure

Virtualization technologies are becoming increasingly common in recent years. One of the major problems in institutions and organizations using virtualization technology is cyber attacks to their virtual resources, e.g., VMs in clouds. In case of an attack, not only one or a few VMs are under the risk, but all datacenters in the cloud face the risk of cyber attack. In this study, we investigate an evacuation model to avoid VMs from the effects of cyber attack by migrating them to quarantine and inspection centers. Our approach minimizes the size of the damage due to cyber attack by rapidly migrating VMs under the risk of malware infection to other locations by taking the warnings provided by intrusion detection mechanisms into consideration. We formulate the problem into a mathematical model which turns out to be an Integer Linear Programming (ILP). The numerical examples show that our approach successfully migrates all or majority of VMs under risk to other locations with minimum migration cost considering storage and network conditions.