How a Network Digital Twin Prevents Change-Related Outages

In today's rapidly evolving IT landscape, effective change management is crucial for maintaining network stability and performance, but many organizations lack a consistent change process. Lack of process often leads to unintended consequences, such as outages and performance degradation. A network digital twin offers a transformative solution to these challenges by streamlining change management processes and providing pre- and post-change verification to enhance operational efficiency.

Challenges in Traditional Change Management

Traditional change management processes are labor-intensive and error-prone. Network operators must manually capture pre- and post-change details through CLI access, upload data from local computers back to tickets, and spend hours on verification checks. This manual approach is not only time-consuming but also susceptible to human error, resulting in inconsistent change implementations and validation processes. The lack of automation and standardization often leads to missed changes and validation steps, causing network instability and requiring extensive troubleshooting

Advantages of a Network Digital Twin

A network digital twin, like the one offered by Forward Networks, addresses these challenges by creating a virtual replica of the network. This digital twin allows for verification of network changes and their impact on the network, and empowers organizations to enforce consistent change processes, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy.

In the IDC Business Value Solution Brief, The Business Value of Forward Networks, (US52128624, June 2024), a financial services customer stated, “Our organization wanted to get better change prediction and change assurance overall. We needed a mechanism to make sure our policy matched the control points in our network. Forward Networks delivered a model, a graph of the network, illustrating where the control points are.”

By streamlining change management with Forward Networks, another financial services company reduced change-related outages from 15 in six months to 2 in the following twelve months.  Forward Networks delivers several change-related benefits including:

1. Automated Data Collection and Analysis: The digital twin automatically collects pre- and post-change network status, enabling engineers to validate connectivity and ensure compliance. This eliminates the need for manual data capture and reduces the risk of errors. By automatically parsing device information and scheduling collections defined by change windows, the digital twin provides comprehensive data for analysis and verification.
2. Consistent Change Implementation: With a digital twin, network engineers can create standardized workspaces for specific changes, such as OS upgrades or the specific devices being changed. Engineers can use workspaces to share predefined checkouts and verifications, ensuring that every change is implemented and verified consistently. Engineers can simply follow a script, reducing the likelihood of errors and ensuring uniformity across different environments.
3. Improved Visibility and Troubleshooting: The digital twin offers enhanced visibility into network configurations and changes. Engineers can quickly identify misconfigurations or inconsistencies, such as MTU mismatches, which can cause performance issues. By providing a detailed view of the network state, the digital twin facilitates faster troubleshooting and resolution of problems, reducing downtime and improving network reliability.
4. Streamlined Change Approval and Rollback: The digital twin streamlines the change approval process by providing management with detailed verification reports and connectivity checks. This increases confidence in the change process and reduces the need for extensive post-change troubleshooting. Additionally, in the rare event that a change needs to be rolled back, the digital twin provides diffs which call out the changes made, simplifying the process.

A network digital twin revolutionizes change management by automating data collection, standardizing processes, and enhancing visibility. This technology not only reduces the workload for network engineers but also improves network stability and performance. Organizations looking to enhance their change management processes should consider integrating a network digital twin into their IT strategy.