Breakout At The Edge

Breakout at the Edge is an SD-WAN feature that routes internet-bound traffic to exit directly from a branch office or remote site to the internet, instead of backhauling through a central gateway or data center. This can be useful to avoid double-tunnelling, or for traffic that does not require reliable or stable network connectivity.

How Breakout at the Edge works

Traffic is classified according to user-defined policies, based on the user’s choice for critical or non-critical purposes:

Critical Traffic — High-priority applications that are essential to business operations and require low latency, high reliability, and consistent security.
Example: Microsoft 365, Zoom, or Salesforce.
Recommendation: Route via Breakout at Gateway for centralized security, monitoring, and compliance.
Non-Critical Traffic — Lower-priority applications that are less sensitive to latency and do not require strict performance guarantees.
Examples: Social networks, Streaming (Netflix), Video Gaming.
Recommendation: Route non-critical traffic through Breakout at the Edge to improve user experience and reduce load on centralized gateways.

When traffic breaks out at the edge, it is not sent through the SD-WAN overlay and bypasses the Adaptiv Connect Network entirely. As a result, while this traffic is sent out directly to the Internet, it can no longer benefit from reliability features (e.g. seamless failover), quality features (e.g. bi-directional QoS), security features (e.g. web filtering, encryption, malware detection), etc.

Breakout at the edge should only be used in very specific cases, such as avoiding double encryption (or double tunnelling), or for non-critical and low-priority traffic already encrypted.

For security reasons, unknown traffic can not be broken out at the edge. In the case of Network Protect, breakout at the edge is disabled for security reasons.

For practical examples of how Breakout at the Edge is a beneficial feature for businesses, you can click on the link: Breakout at the Edge Business Use Cases