Abstract: One embodiment of the presently-disclosed invention relates to an intrusion prevention system that includes a plurality of FPGA instances and a plurality of compute instances in a cloud network. The plurality of FPGA instances perform pre-processing that determines whether data packets received from the network gateway are associated with suspicious flows. The data packets associated with the suspicious flows are communicated from the plurality of FPGA instances to a plurality of compute instances in the cloud network. The plurality of compute instances perform post-processing that determines whether a suspicious flow is malicious. Other embodiments, aspects and features are also disclosed.