🚨The Hidden Risk of Local Breakout | What Happens When It Fails?💥
Understanding Local Internet Breakout Failures in SD-WAN | Risks and Consequences
Driving SD-WAN Adoption in South Africa
Local internet breakout is a key feature of modern SD-WAN solutions, allowing direct access to cloud applications without hairpinning through a data centre. It improves performance, reduces latency, and keeps traffic off expensive MPLS links. But what happens when that breakout fails? If your network relies purely on a local internet path, you might be in for a nasty surprise.
The Reality of Local Breakout Failures 💥🚨
Imagine this: You’ve got a VMware SD-WAN Edge (VeloCloud) deployed at a branch, happily sending cloud-bound traffic via a local internet breakout. No tunnels, no detours—just clean, direct internet access. Then, without warning, the internet path dies. Maybe it’s an ISP outage, maybe it’s an upstream routing failure, or maybe it’s just gremlins in the network. The result? Your cloud applications are dead in the water.
What Happens Next?
1. If There’s an Alternative WAN Link ⚡️🚀
If you’re lucky enough to have a secondary internet link, the SD-WAN Edge should fail over automatically. VMware SD-WAN continuously monitors link health, and if one path degrades or drops, traffic is steered to the next best path. This failover happens within 700ms to 1 second, keeping disruptions minimal.
However, not all applications handle failover gracefully. Some cloud services, like Microsoft 365 or Zoom, might drop sessions when the source IP changes, leading to a temporary service disruption.
2. If Local Breakout Fails Completely 🚫💨
Now, here’s where things get messy. If there’s no backup ISP and local breakout fails, all direct-to-internet traffic is dead. What happens next depends on how your SD-WAN is configured:
Using Cloud Gateways? You’re Safe. 🛡️ If the SD-WAN Edge has an active tunnel to a VMware SD-WAN Gateway, the network can dynamically reroute traffic via the cloud backbone. Instead of using local breakout, traffic will now hairpin through the SD-WAN fabric before exiting to the internet. This keeps services alive but adds latency.
No Backup Path? Game Over. 😵 If there’s no backup ISP and no active SD-WAN tunnels, you’re toast. Traffic will simply fail, users will complain, and IT will be scrambling for a fix.
Why Fusion’s SD-WAN Solves This Problem 🚀🔐
Fusion SD-WAN eliminates these pain points with a smarter, more resilient approach:
Multi-Path Load Balancing & Failover – Fusion dynamically bonds multiple WAN links, so failover is seamless and instant, without session drops.
ISP-Agnostic Performance Monitoring – Unlike traditional setups, Fusion actively probes upstream paths and detects failures before they cause disruptions.
Automatic Policy-Based Routing – Instead of relying solely on local breakout, Fusion can dynamically shift traffic between direct breakout, cloud VPN, or backbone paths based on real-time conditions.
The Bottom Line: Don’t Rely on a Single Breakout ⚠️🌐
Local breakout is great—until it isn’t. Without redundancy, a single failure can bring your cloud access to a grinding halt. SD-WAN solutions like Fusion provide intelligent failover, ensuring that your network remains resilient even when the unexpected happens. If you’re running business-critical applications, having a backup plan isn’t optional—it’s essential.
So, next time someone suggests relying purely on local breakout, ask them: What happens when it fails?
