In the Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking 2024 and the Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies 2024 reports, Gartner describes Network Digital Twins as transformational technology, "the highest level of predicted impact among all technologies included in the report." The potential benefits of Network Digital Twins include better visibility into asset health, improved security, reliability and performance and cost savings. In this article, we'll summarize Gartner's analysis, explain the challenges and opportunities offered by network digital twins, and outline the complementary capability that are needed to full leverage a network digital twin's potential.
Gartner’s analysis and guidance on network digital twins to IT leaders
Gartner states that a network digital twin allows you to validate the configuration and security policies applied to the components of your network and provide a baseline for automation. Gartner states that policy and configuration validation and automation have become even more critical due to increased business demands on digital services, far more network complexity, the frenetic pace of changes, and limited availability of skilled resources. Gartner advises that the ROI justification for network digital twin can be made on the basis of cost savings resulting from preventing security and configuration issues alone. As an added benefit, Gartner believes: “that a network digital twin can improve stability and security of digital services and reduce delivery times for requests by 20% across the network.”
Gartner identifies three levels of digital twin:
- Level 1 (available now): Automatic network modeling with policy validation of the network, security, and migration to cloud.
- Level 2 (available now): Single vendor device replacements or upgrades for simpler what-if scenarios.
- Level 3 (aspirational): Multiple vendor migration or vendor replacement - manipulating multiple points and then relying on the prediction for complex what-if scenarios.
Most of the market adoption of network digital twins is at Level 1 and Level 2.
Gartner has said that Level 3 digital twins are extremely expensive to implement (just setting up the environment costs in the millions). Level 3 is also highly aspirational for digital twin vendors at this point due to lack of reliability when predicting outcomes in a dynamic and complex network. Many organizations would find that the cost of implementing a Level 3 digital twin prohibitive and unnecessary.
IP Fabric’s assurance platform extends digital twin capabilities with insights needed throughout the enterprise
Gartner now includes IP Fabric in the Network Digital Twin category, covering Level 1 and Level 2. Note that the industry has not aligned around the Digital Twin terminology. Some competitors in our space fully align with the digital twin branding while others like IP Fabric use different terminology and simply state that Digital Twin is a use case. We refer to IP Fabric as an Assurance Platform because it helps assure outcomes such as security, efficiency, and reliability and is used beyond the network team.
We believe that in regulated companies delivering critical applications, accurate end-to-end insights about network, cloud, and security must be integrated into workflows throughout the organization. While digital twin capabilities provide valuable data about the production environment, IP Fabric’s Network Assurance capabilities go on to provide deep, outcomes-oriented analytics to reveal critical risks and opportunities in an intuitive way which makes those insights consumable by multiple teams and currently existing systems in the technology stack.
Here's how IP Fabric works:
- Automatically discovers and contextualizes end-to-end network and cloud data and produces time-based snapshots of your entire network. It captures inventory, configuration, and state data, converting it into a vendor-neutral model for all teams and skillsets. It doesn’t rely on error-prone SNMP like other solutions but rather works like a network engineer making its way through your network with nothing more than a seed IP and read-only credentials to start.
- IP Fabric analytics reveal risks and opportunities to improve stability, security, and cost. Using built-in (over 160 currently) and custom intent verification rules, vendor databases and third-party data sources about CVEs or EOL/EOS, for example, IP Fabric checks configuration, state, topology, policy, device, and path information and provides insights that other tools miss.
- IP Fabric shares results and initiates remediation through the UI and API using existing toolsets, accommodating current generational changes in the workforce – bridging the gap between those who are expecting to work in the CLI and those expecting to work in the UI and API.
We recently helped a hyperscaler customer get “unstuck” with a large data center refresh project for which they were 18 months behind. A leader on this project said, “I knew we had a lot of technical debt, but I had no idea the size of it. IP Fabric helped us flip over all the stones keeping us stagnant on this project.”
Go beyond scenario planning
IP Fabric customers use our automated network assurance platform to improve day-to-day operations and to unlock strategic IT initiatives. While Gartner advises that the ROI justification for network digital twin can be made based on cost savings resulting from preventing security and configuration issues alone, we believe there are even more financial benefits to automated network assurance as shown in the table below.
| More stable and secure day-to-day | Unlock strategic initiatives | Improve the bottom line |
| Better digital services availability & performance with proactive problem detection | Trusted accurate data set to accelerate automation or AI initiatives and assure CICD loop. | Confidently launch revenue-driving digital services |
| Configuration compliance and drift detection for safer change management | Big modernization programs completed on time without issues. Faster project due diligence | Reduce technical debt |
| More accurate monitoring, CMDB, inventory, firewall and vendor management tools | Regulatory compliance requirements & auditor evidence produced automatically | Improve customer experience & keep customer confidence |
Guidance on adopting network digital twins
Gartner makes important recommendations regarding the adoption of network digital twins. They recommend piloting a network digital twin if you are adopting automation in your network and recommend picking a multivendor solution which should be used for validating configuration and policy changes.
If you want to learn more about how IP Fabric can help you maximize the impact of network digital twins, contact us to find out about how to get a free trial of IP Fabric or sign up for our free, self-guided demo to learn at your own pace here.
