An efficient approach for cascading out-of-box services is disclosed. The inventive system has a packet router, with out-of-box interfaces, and out-of-box servers, the latter being connected to the interfaces and implementing the out-of-box services. The interfaces and the serves are configured in a virtual local area network (VLAN), as identified by a VLAN identifier (ID), which performs a specific number of the services and in a specific order on a stream of packets. The packet router, in a single action, routes packets with the VLAN ID to a particular VLAN in order to subject those packets to the number and order of services then associated with that VLAN ID.