Indus River client software, River Pilot, includes the IP addresses of sites to which the remote client will tunnel. If the IP address being sought is not on the address table, it is sent out unencrypted to the Internet at large.
Users say the feature they call a split tunnel, has two benefits.
First, if the remote user is a busy telecommuter, it means not having to repeatedly reestablish the tunnel as they switch between access to the corporate network and the Internet. Second, it keeps traffic off the corporate router. If all traffic, including Internet traffic, from the remote user is tunneled to the corporate site, the corporate router handles it. So all the remote user's Internet traffic would be routed at the central site and sent out the corporate Internet access link. The split tunnel feature relieves some of the burden on the central router and lightens traffic on the Internet link.