4 reasons to consider a network digital twin

Twins can help enhance digital experience, which is the sum of a user’s digital-based interactions with a product, service, device, etc. Given how many points of interaction exist within a typical enterprise, digital experience is a priority.

“Digital experience twins are a new concept that virtualizes an end user, application, or IoT device to validate the network experience and predict problems before they impact user experience,” says Bob Friday, chief AI officer at Juniper Networks.

“These digital experience twins are versatile, seamlessly integrating into live networks operating on existing IT infrastructure,” Friday says. “In today’s world, ensuring seamless connectivity and optimizing user, device, and application experiences are paramount for driving business success.”

Digital twins and digital experience twins are vital tools to ensure the expected behavior of the network, validate security, and assure user experience before users or devices experience issues on the network that can impact the business Friday.

Greater efficiency

Digital twins enable simulation of data across multiple business systems. IDC research has shown that IT organizations are losing lots of time searching for necessary information to perform a job function, Lang says.

“By unifying the data in a single interface, as well as performing analysis across multiple data sets, digital twins improve worker efficiency and the quality and accuracy of analytical outputs,” he says.

Digital twins offer user interfaces into complex processes and data sets that are more intuitive and approachable to interact with for non-technical audiences, Lang says. “This means the skilled labor barrier is lower,” he says. “Lines of business can be more self-sufficient, and people can more rapidly and accurately interpret data to drive improved decision-making.”

One example of increased efficiency from digital twins comes from a large multi-national automotive manufacturer cited by Dan Issacs, general manager and CTO of the Digital Twins Consortium, a global ecosystem of users who are driving best practices for digital twin usage and defining requirements for new digital twin standards.

The automotive company’s IT infrastructure includes more than 5,000 servers, with each twin of a server having more than 400 data points from multiple systems and running 2,000 events per second, Issacs says.

The digital twin of the IT infrastructure brings “the integration of the multiple disparate IT management systems into a single view for cross system event monitoring, prediction and action triggering to achieve optimized outcomes,” Issacs says. It enables operational efficiency, through the ability to predict infrastructure and even help prevent unplanned downtime, he says.

In general, digital twins provide a comprehensive view of network performance and usage patterns, potentially providing improved analysis, greater coverage, more accurate predictive analytics, and enhanced management approaches, Isaacs says.