Our SOS design philosophy means that, where possible, we avoid integrating third-party code. We also believe that the most flexible security solutions come from using software-led technology because it’s easier to re-design than hardware. It also means we can tweak to squeeze more performance from standard hardware platforms. Clavister prefers to use off-the-shelf hardware components because of the price and speed to market benefits this approach delivers.

Clavister development is guided by four fundamental principles:

Keep the granularity.
Other vendors sacrifice control and flexibility, forcing network administrators to make uncomfortable choices. We let the customer configure & optimize the exact solution they need.

Write the core code.
The more software chunks you bring in from outside, the more integration headaches and performance penalties you pay. We wrote our own IP, TCP and filtering stacks as well as our own kernel. No clunky kluges, just elegant integration

Software when you can, hardware when you must.
Software is easier to develop, re-design, tweak and update than hardware. We know there's a place for special chips but we always choose a software solution first. And our software can squeeze more from even the most basic hardware.

Be an aggressive follower.
We prefer off-the-shelf components because they cost less and let us get to market faster. The trick is to squeeze more performance out of whatever we use. We may not be 'bleeding edge', but we win a lot of awards for the things that matter most: price/performance, flexibility and scalability.

There it is.
Not a revolutionary manifesto, but in a security market that profits from 'blinding with science', we think it's a powerful set of principles that got us to where we are today (and where we're going tomorrow).