Gartner predicts that the digital twin will fundamentally change how business networks are managed. The digital twin is the user interface for network automation and dynamic network documentation. Network automation, on the other hand, is a more advanced solution than the traditional network monitoring system. Chiara Regale (Vice President of Forward Networks) also relies on this prediction in her recent article:
Organizations with hybrid multi-cloud environments will benefit the most from a digital twin.
What you don’t see, you don’t control
Familiarity with documentation is vital in strategic and tactical consulting for information networks. It wouldn’t be news to anyone to state that the content is quite diverse in terms of quality, substantive content, usefulness, and up-to-dateness. The larger the network expands through acquisitions and hybrid architecture, the more the overall picture becomes blurred.
Why documentation is not up-to-date
The most common reasons are easy to list: Change of the personnel responsible for the process, constant high workload, too little number of expert personnel, several simultaneous network change projects, multi-vendor environments, in the event of a failure, quick correction of an acute problem with, e.g., static routing that is permanently forgotten, unclear purpose of use of documentation, numerous service providers with subcontractors, etc. This challenge is unlikely to change in the future and to be resolved by agreements.
The technology solutions suppliers also believe (or sales argument) that their solution is straightforward to manage and gives a good overview of the whole. From the point of view of a large company, it is the management views of hundreds of individual solutions.
The situation is constantly becoming more complex. Traditional networks with data centers were ultimately relatively static. The future business networks will be much more dynamic and, together with dynamic cloud services, more complex. A digital twin solves these challenges.
Barriers to creating a digital twin
Chiara Regale’s (Vice President, Forward Networks) view is correct, although I can’t entirely agree with everything. The technology owner must recognize and accept the IT world’s fragmented reality.
Too often see sales pitches with a perfect solution for a 90s web environment.
In fact, we live in a service market where companies buy IT services from numerous suppliers. They are not interested in “easy and automated management” because they outsourced those tasks a decade ago. Savings in expert work do not work as a sales argument. No matter how good and great the new technology is, the customer buying the service usually cannot (and does not want to) intervene in the technology choices.
In SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, the customer owns the configuration, not the technology and its management.
The digital twin vendors, whose technology is based on an agentless solution and only configuration read access, work well in a multi-vendor service environment. With it, all the customer’s stakeholders, the auditor, and the sub-area owners can see the enterprise network with changes.
Regarding network automation and its digital twin, the result is fascinating. Potential network and security problems, acute failure, and future planning can be solved 10x faster comparing today. But, from the point of customer buying the service, things are the responsibility of the service providers. By creating a digital twin, the customer would practically tell his suppliers what is wrong. That reality is hard to accept.
In the fragmented, dynamic IT service market, we need new perspectives from the purchasing customer and the technology and service suppliers. I believe that the digital twin is the way of the future to lead the development of the network. It is a change to higher quality management with facts. In fragmented and siloed change management, on the other hand, online automation is hardly visible for a long time.
Hannu Rokka, Senior Advisor
5Feet Networks Oy