With the growing cyber-security threats, ensuring the security of data in Cloud data centers is a challenging task. A prominent type of attack on Cloud data centers is data tampering attack that can jeopardize the confidentiality and the integrity of data. In this article, we present a security and performance driven architecture for these centers that incorporates an intrusion management system for multi-tenant distributed transactional databases. The proposed architecture uses a novel data partitioning and placement scheme based on damage containment and communication cost of distributed transactions. In addition, we present a benchmarking framework for evaluating the performance of the proposed architecture. The results illustrate a trade-off between security and performance goals for Cloud data centers.