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When depots send internet traffic through head office, a route that once made sense can become a source of delay and a shared point of failure. Serguey Shinder describes how that happened at his company after important applications moved to external hosting: traffic still detoured through the office, even when the application provider was much nearer to a depot.
Why did every depot’s internet traffic pass through head office?
In a first-person account on DEV Community, Serguey Shinder says the network was designed in 2016 around the assumption that the company’s systems lived at head office. Depot traffic crossed a private circuit to the office, passed through a firewall and web filter, and then used the office’s internet connection to reach external services.
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That arrangement fit the original location of the systems. But later, most of the company’s applications moved elsewhere. One provider’s data centre was described as about 20 miles from the largest depot, yet traffic from that depot still traveled to head office and back out toward the provider. The route reflected where systems used to be, not where they were now.
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Extra delay for depot scanners
Shinder reports that handheld scanner responses at the largest depot had slowed to about 1.5 seconds, compared with about one-third of a second three years earlier. He attributed the added delay to the longer network route, not to a failing application. At 900 scans in a shift, he estimated the difference amounted to 20 minutes of waiting. These are the author’s figures and calculation; the account does not provide an independent test or measurement method.
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A shared connection became a dependency
The same design meant that a fault in head office’s internet connection could block access from every site, even when applications at their providers were operating normally. Shinder says a connection fault in February lasted a little over three hours and left all company sites unable to reach those applications. The account illustrates the distinction between an application being available and a location having a working path to it.
What changed in the redesign?
Shinder describes three connected changes rather than a single equipment swap:
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- Local internet breakout: each site received a direct route to the internet instead of sending all traffic through head office.
- Secondary connectivity at smaller sites: mobile connections were added as backup links.
- Service-delivered filtering and inspection: these functions moved from an on-site box to a service.
Changing the route also meant rebuilding filtering rules that had been tuned over nine years. The depots stayed on the old path for six months while the team gathered evidence that the new one behaved as intended. That validation period is a useful reminder: changing where traffic exits can affect security policy as well as performance.
What results did the author report?
Shinder says scanner response times returned to about one-third of a second and circuit spending fell by about one-third. These are outcomes reported by the author, not independently verified benchmarks. The account gives no cost breakdown or before-and-after test protocol, so the figures should not be treated as a forecast for another organization.
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What can another multi-site business take from the story?
The central question is whether a network’s traffic paths still match the locations of the systems people need to reach. A practical review can start with these checks:
- Map where applications are hosted and where each site’s traffic currently exits.
- Identify which sites depend on a central office connection to reach external services.
- Consider resilience for both the site’s primary link and any centralized services or security controls.
- Plan how existing filtering and inspection rules will move, including how policy changes will be checked.
- Validate the new path in stages before retiring the old one, using application response and access behavior that matter to the business.
Local breakout is not a universal prescription: the right routing and security design depends on an organization’s applications, policies, and resilience needs. The broader lesson in Shinder’s account is captured in his sentence, “A network is a set of assumptions about where things are.” When those assumptions change, the routes should be reviewed too.
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