Our focus lies on appliances that perform functions such as firewalling, load balancing, caching, SSL certificates acceleration and other related functions.
MARA Systems' appliances combine functionalities to minimize the need for complementary products. Each function is carefully implemented to maintain the high security level of the system.
The most common way of adapting the feature set and functionality of a software product to the need of a particular client, is typically by configuring the product to the client's specification. In most cases, this means that the largest part of the code in the application actually goes unused. With the low cost of disk, this is often not a problem.
In the case of network security appliances, the preferences are different. An appliance with all its code stored in flash memory will be faster and more reliable than one with a disk, but to get there, the footprint of the application must be reduced, typically to a few tens of Mbytes. This calls for custom development, where the developer actually removes those parts of the code that will not be used by the application in its design environment.
Using rapid development instead of configuring a product is also a fundamentally more secure solution. Virtually all code contains bugs, and some of them open up for security breaches. Then, if you deliver less code, the risk for a security hole goes down. Small footprint network security appliance software is not only faster, it is fundamentally safer than a large, configured application.