User-Powered Value: Leveraging the Forward Community to Accelerate Your Business

IDC’s Business Value Solution Brief validates the impressive value delivered by the Forward Networks platform. According to the paper, the average user reaps $14.2M in value annually. This is achieved through improved efficiency, improved productivity, reduced downtime, and additional operational benefits (automated compliance validation, ability to achieve more without hiring, overall improvement to business operations, and additional revenue). 

In addition to the platform, the Forward Networks user community delivers ongoing value by helping users get the most benefit from their investment. In my experience, engineers don't simply read about how a platform can improve their operations; they expert vendors to, “show me”. They want firsthand visibility into how their peers are using Forward Networks' digital twin technology to uncover insights that help them make the network more secure and reliable. 

In the spirit of “show me”, I’d like to share some examples of how the Community is helping users get the data they need from the network.

Compliance 

A standout Forward Networks feature is the ability to automate compliance verification. Forward allows you to proactively verify network configurations against compliance standards including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, STIG, and many others.  

One user shared a query he developed to locate recursive patterns as part of his team's compliance efforts. Using NQE helped locate nested patterns. This saved his company time, and by sharing it, he saved even more time for Community members who needed to solve the same problem.

Recursively Match a Pattern 

Performing configuration compliance checks requires completing sophisticated searches of device configurations, often looking for data within data. NQE parses configuration data and identifies patterns important to determining device configuration compliance. 

Achieving Stress Free STIG Compliance

The Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIGs) are device security guidelines set by the United States government's Defense Information Security Agency (DISA). DISA is responsible for maintaining the security requirements necessary to access the Department of Defense Information Systems Information Networks (DODIN). Adhering to these guidelines and passing audits is an extremely stressful undertaking for federal network engineers. Our Customer Success Engineer, Arica Beckstead, developed a series of NQE checks designed to “pre-check” the network for STIG compliance ahead of an audit. These checks identify any compliance issues and provide detailed information on how to solve them. Watch this demo on demand to see it in action.

Checking the existence of two conditions with NQE

As part of doing configuration audits for his NX-OS devices, Community member “Cariddir” needed a check to see if two conditions were met in a configuration to verify compliance. He turned to the Community for help in crafting the query and was immediately helped by Forward Networks' Technical Solutions Architect, Glen Turner.

Network security

Security is a paramount concern for any network. The Forward Community offers several discussions and articles to enhance your network's security posture. Security policy verification within the Forward platform ensures security policies are correctly applied across your network.

NQE Check EC2 Instance for 'default' Security Group

Community member “Brinkard'' and Forward Networks' Technical Solutions Architect “Captainpacket” created this NQE script to analyze all of the AWS security groups and show which ones are associated with a particular EC2 instance. Any groups that are tagged as a default security group are tagged as being in violation. The script allows platform users to restrict the query to specific cloud accounts as needed or add additional information (instance tags, image type, etc.) from the data model.

Network provisioning and scaling 

Forward Networks provides important insights for network provisioning and scaling by providing detailed network visibility and automated verification of network configurations, ensuring that new resources are deployed accurately and efficiently. 

WAN, INT Interfaces info through NQE query

Community user “Nand” and Forward Networks' Technical Solutions Architect “GaryB” created an NQE query in Forward Networks to get WAN, INT information. This is a great example of using the built-in "matches" function to save hours of work. By collaborating within the Community, “Nand '' was able to solve his issue quickly and accurately.

A little help if possible to do some math

Community members “Cariddir”, ”AndyL”, Forward Networks' Customer Success Engineer "Tyson Henrie", and Forward Networks' Technical Solutions Architect “Gary B” teamed up to create this script with the goal of determining how ‘over provisioned’ "Cariddir" is on his switches (i.e. how many ports have never passed a packet). Having accurate data allowed “Cariddir” to scale back his spend on new equipment because he discovered many of his switches were over provisioned.

The Forward Community is helping users access accurate network data quickly to make their network more reliable and secure. By collaborating with each other and Forward Networks' engineers, users are expanding the ways Forward Networks can support their company and make their team more efficient.  

As Helen Keller famously said, “Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” Our Community is creating new ways to extract value from the platform and helping one another tackle complex issues. 

Join the Forward Networks Community:

The Community is open to everyone interested in exploring the use cases for a network digital twin. Join us today to start benefiting from shared knowledge and collaboration.