The Challenges of Full Network Visibility and How a Network Digital Twin Can Help

In today’s complex IT environments, maintaining full network visibility is a daunting task. Network segmentation, while essential for security, often complicates the process of obtaining a comprehensive view of the entire network infrastructure. Federal IT departments charged with the responsibility of keeping networks mission-ready, face significant hurdles in visualizing connectivity, ensuring security zone segmentation, and performing complete path searches across segmented domains. 

Network Segmentation - Beneficial and Complex

Network segmentation involves dividing a network into multiple segments or domains, each with its own administrative control. This segmentation is crucial for minimizing risk in the event of a security incident by containing potential threats within isolated sections. However, this also results in several challenges:

• Limited Visibility: Segmentation can obscure the overall connectivity map, making it difficult to visualize how different parts of the network interact.
• Complex Troubleshooting: Diagnosing issues that span multiple segments is challenging without a unified view of the network. Connectivity problems in one segment may have root causes in another, but traditional tools often fail to provide this cross-domain insight.
• Operational Inefficiencies: The lack of a holistic view can lead to inefficiencies in network management, as operators must switch between different administrative interfaces and manually piece together information.

Network Digital Twins Provide Integrated Visibility

In the same way Google Maps is a context-rich digital twin of transportation systems and roads, a network digital twin is a searchable digital replica of a network’s physical and logical components that enables engineers to ensure the network behaves as expected and that security policies are enforced. Forward Networks’ merged snapshots feature addresses the visibility and troubleshooting challenges posed by network segmentation.

How Merged Snapshots Work

The merged snapshots feature integrates snapshots from different administrative domains to create a unified view. Here’s how it works:

1. Collect Individual Snapshots: Gather network snapshots from each segment, capturing the state and configuration of each domain.
2. Merge Snapshots: Import these snapshots into Forward Enterprise and use the merge function to combine them, creating a comprehensive view that spans all domains.
3. Perform Connectivity Testing: Conduct connectivity tests within this merged snapshot environment. Operators can initiate tests from one site to another and visualize the entire path, including the underlay, across different segments.

Benefits of Merged Snapshots

• Unprecedented Visibility: By combining snapshots from various administrative domains, operators gain full visibility across the entire network, transcending traditional segmentation boundaries.
• Improved Troubleshooting: With a unified view, operators can quickly identify and resolve connectivity issues that span multiple domains. The ability to see the entire path that traffic takes facilitates accurate diagnostics and efficient problem-solving.
• Enhanced Efficiency: A comprehensive network view streamlines operations, reducing downtime, and improving the overall efficiency of network management.

To see the merged snapshot feature in use, watch this 3-minute video I created. Learn more by reading the use case.