Network Backhauling

Businesses are less centralized than they used to be—and so are their networks. Many organizations with distributed offices provide internet to their branches via an approach called traffic backhauling.

Backhauling requires branches to route their internet traffic back to a central datacenter to implement security processes there, rat her than interacting directly with the public internet.  

Traffic backhauling is useful for provisioning secure connectivity to branches of an organization. With backhauling, there’s no need to deploy network security to each location because inspection is centralized—and historically, that’s an approach that made a lot of sense. Just a few years ago, many businesses backhauled at least some of their internet traffic, with some organizations backhauling up to 80%. 

Routing back all traffic to a central access point can have a negative impact on latency-sensitive applications like Microsoft 365 or Zoom calls.

How we use the internet is changing, and cloud and real-time applications have become prolific. The resulting increase in traffic from these apps can make backhauling a less-than-optimal approach.

As you might imagine, the extra routing distance back to the central network and potential for bottlenecks can have an impact on how your apps perform. While backhauling can streamline security, it also increases latency and slows performance.

This may not be noticeable for all online activities. But businesses are relying more and more on real-time apps such as Zoom and cloud-based call centers—and these are precisely the types of apps that are affected. As if slow performance wasn’t enough of an issue, building and maintaining a backhaul network can be costly too.