Hardware Acceleration Critical Component for Cost-Conscious Data Centers

Application-layer vulnerabilities might be able to be detected at the host but they often aren't (otherwise we wouldn't see so many breaches detailed in the news). Malicious payloads, content filtering, etc... are all generally deployed on separate infrastructure, as is quality of service (which often requires inspection to determine what the application really is before applying service quality policies) and more advanced L7 load balancing.

 

 

Persistence is a requirement for almost all applications in any load balanced environment, including cloud, and often requires inspection of headers and data that would be hidden when transported via SSL.