Ongoing ransomware attacks have forced business to think about security of their resources. Recently, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) have become easy targets for attackers since they don’t have cyber defense mechanism in place other than simple firewall systems which are quite vulnerable. Cyber defense systems are costly and often not within the budget of SMEs which inspired to think about low cost yet highly efficient cyber defense solutions. This research explores the prospects of implementing a Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi)-based intelligent cyber-defense system (iCDS) for SME networks and Smart-homes to filter malicious contents from incoming traffic. Primarily, the work presented in this paper tries to evaluate the hardware capability of network interfaces (both internal, and attached) of Raspberry Pi for handle high volumes of incoming traffic. For this, we measure the network performance of the Raspberry Pi using the speed test software. The results show that the built in Ethernet interface outperforms the built in WiFi and external attached USB to Ethernet Adapter in terms of latency, download and upload throughput.