Interface Masters Technologies

Interface Masters Technologies makes the network visibility hardware that sits underneath most enterprise security monitoring stacks: passive and active network TAPs, bypass switches, and packet brokers (branded PacketMasters) that copy, aggregate, filter, and load-balance network traffic before handing it to IPS, IDS, SIEM, and other inline or out-of-band security appliances. Its bypass switches specifically protect against a common failure mode in inline security deployments — if an inline IPS or firewall appliance fails or is taken offline for maintenance, the bypass switch keeps network traffic flowing rather than causing an outage, a capability that has made the company a long-standing OEM supplier to larger network and security vendors rather than a household name to end customers.

Founded in 1995 by Ben Askarinam, a former Xerox executive, and based in San Jose, California, Interface Masters has operated as a specialist hardware manufacturer in the network visibility category for three decades, predating most of the software-defined security monitoring market it now feeds. The company designs and manufactures its own boards and appliances rather than reselling merchant silicon platforms, and supplies both branded products and white-label OEM/ODM hardware to networking and security vendors.

As foundational infrastructure rather than a detection or analytics product in its own right, Interface Masters’ relevance is tied to the continued need for physical traffic-tap points in enterprise and data center networks — a category more mature and slower-moving than software security tooling, but still a real dependency for any organization running inline security appliances that cannot tolerate a single point of failure.