An system comprising an ingress device configured to receive and process data, wherein the ingress device comprises a plurality of processing stages configured to process the data, wherein a configurable subset of the stages comprises a selectable tap point, and wherein the ingress device is further configured to, upon reaching a selected tap point, suspend processing and send at least a portion of the data to another device; an offload engine device configured to receive data from the ingress device, after the selected tap point has been reached, and to provide additional processing of the data, which the ingress device is not configured to provide; an egress device configured to transmit the data that has been additionally processed by the offload engine device.