Network Visibility and Packet Broker Infrastructure for Security and Monitoring Tools

Founded in 2014 by Shlomo Gurfinkel and based in Rosh Haayin, Israel, CGS Tower Networks builds network visibility infrastructure that feeds security, analytics, and monitoring tools with the traffic they actually need. Its portfolio spans passive optical TAPs and bypass switches through standard and advanced network packet brokers to virtual packet brokers for cloud and NFV environments. Customers are enterprises and operators in telecommunications, utilities, financial services, high tech, manufacturing, and the public sector.

The architecture rests on a disaggregation approach: a hardware-agnostic software layer, marketed as the Unified Visibility Architecture, runs on commercial off-the-shelf platforms built around Broadcom switching silicon and x86, PowerPC, or ARM CPUs, in physical or virtualized form. The advanced packet brokers take a CPU-based rather than switch-based path, applying header parsing, deduplication, packet slicing, data masking, defragmentation, GTP subscriber correlation, load balancing, and DPI with regex matching before forwarding filtered traffic downstream. DPDK acceleration handles line-rate throughput.

Differentiation rests largely on cost structure and scale: because the software is decoupled from the silicon, the company says it can migrate visibility functions onto newer COTS hardware quickly rather than shipping proprietary chassis. Published specifications include a regex engine searching 150,000 keywords at 100Gbps line rate, filter tables reaching one million rules, appliances from 5Gbps desktop units up to 400Gbps server clusters, and Tera-Pro deep buffers that absorb microbursts. It sits in the visibility segment alongside established vendors such as Gigamon and Keysight.