The firm is a pioneer in appliance based cybersecurity with decades of experience selling to enterprise and government organizations. Its network security monitoring appliances are deployed inside the firewall to detect various attacks such as zero day exploits, malware and insider threats.

The firm’s proprietary signature generation and matching software was initially developed to run on x86 processors. However, over time plain software running on x86 CPUs was no longer enough. If the firm was to maintain its lead in the cybersecurity market its approach to signature generation and matching had to be radically rethought.          

A number of different design options were explored, but ultimately the firm settled on “porting” its algorithms to run on an FPGA since it would provide the needed performance boost and flexibility for signature generation and matching.

In selecting a solution the firm had the following strict requirements:

• Need new platform to deploy signature generation and matching algorithms
• Require custom features to meet key product requirements
• Require cost effective, lossless packet capture solution with full service support