Forward Networks’ flagship product, Forward Enterprise, delivers a vendor-agnostic “digital twin” of the network, designed for both cloud and on-prem networks
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Forward Networks is the only platform that prevents network fires by giving you all the data you need to ensure your network stays in policy and behaves exactly as expected. It takes a lot of stress off of Network Architects and has helped global companies retake control of their hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
Stop by our tent and talk with one of our technical experts about your worst network challenges, and we’ll work through exactly how to solve it. While you’re in the booth, register to win a YETI cooler and Fuse mountain bike.
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1:1 Technical Sessions
Share your networking goals and challenges with one of our field engineers, and we'll provide custom recommendations that address your security, cloud, and network operations challenges. By attending a session, you'll also be entered into an exclusive drawing for an Oru Kayak. If you aren't able to attend Cisco Live but use the link below to schedule an online session, you'll still be entered in the drawing.
If your network beast includes hardware and software from dozens of vendors, spread across multiple data centers and clouds, and runs mission-critical applications with challenging security requirements… then join this 30-minute session featuring real-life examples from large, “beastly” enterprise networks that found a path to reliability, agility, and security.
Join this 10-minute session for lightning demos of two of the best security features of Forward Enterprise that have transformed Vulnerability Management and Incident Management for our customers. Nikhil will explain how a mathematical model, or “digital twin,” of your network enables SecOps teams to prioritize vulnerabilities and respond to security incidents faster and with greater accuracy.
Interest in digital twin technology is on the rise, likely driven by the pressure placed on IT teams to ensure that their networks are predictable, agile, and secure. Network and security operations teams are actively investigating how implementing a digital twin can help their teams become more proactive and provide confidence that the network will behave as expected, even in the face of constant change.
Why is Digital Twin Technology Trending?
Interest in digital twin technology continues to trend upwards as more enterprise shops realize the need for software to monitor and understand network behavior. Most large enterprises have networks that have grown over the past two or three decades; they are a complex system of devices from dozens of vendors using multiple operating systems that run on billions (yes, BILLIONS) of lines of configuration code. And let’s not forget, the network is constantly changing; any diagram is out of date the second it’s printed.
In the midst of this complexity, the network has arguably become more important to businesses than their physical buildings — including storefronts. If one location is forced to close, the rest of the system operates as usual; if part of the network goes down, the entire corporate operation often comes to a standstill. It takes a pretty significant and unusual event to close down a location, but one typo alone can take down the network.
So, complexity multiplied by criticality is driving interest in digital twins. Gartner Group’s report, Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Communications, discusses the impact of digital twin software on enterprise networks and future adoption rates.
Will Digital Twin Software Help My Security and Network Operations Teams?
Let’s face it, most IT shops are drowning in tools, which may make the idea of a digital twin sound cumbersome instead of exciting. But it shouldn’t be — digital twins can do more than discrete tools and deliver information in intuitive, actionable formats. To determine if your organization could benefit from a digital twin, ask yourself if any of the following 10 statements are true:
My engineers spend most of their time proactively improving the network.
When there’s an issue on the network, we can pinpoint the source in seconds without performing manual path and configuration searches.
We do not have a backlog of new applications to deploy that are awaiting security review.
We can prove our security posture throughout our hybrid multi-cloud environment with mathematical certainty.
When a CVE alert is issued, we immediately know which devices on our network are impacted and the severity of the impact.
We have checks in place to ensure that we don’t make expensive cloud routing mistakes.
We perform verification checks before pushing automated updates live.
The configuration code in my network is searchable.
We immediately understand the potential blast radius if a network device is compromised.
We can test how a firewall change will impact the network before pushing it live.
If you ranked any of the statements above as false, a digital twin can help your team be more efficient and effective at running the network. Most of the Fortune 1000 enterprises we speak with have stated that most, if not all, of these statements were false before working with us. Once they see our digital twin in action, they never want to go back. To get an individual assessment of how a digital twin can help your engineering team, request a demo.
NQE Helps Entertainment Venue Avoid 'Spectacular Customer Service Fail'
As any company that specializes in live entertainment knows, you're only as good as your last success. In fact, most entertainment venues are well aware that the difference between good and bad press attention often comes down to something as simple as whether a single bulb lights up at the right second.
Proper maintenance for such venues is so vital, in fact, that the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) says ride and attraction maintenance is the second-highest expense they face – with only employee payroll costing more. The average cost of an attraction “going down” is $100K per hour, not including the impacts of negative press.
However, as one such entertainment venue recently discovered, it's not only vital to ensure that the proverbial light bulb is turned on at the right second, it's just as important to ensure that backup systems work properly should a failsafe become necessary.
One network engineer who works in infrastructure operations and service delivery with such a venue recently encountered this situation when his team was tasked with verifying the network design. Traditionally, his team has had to assign several engineers to manually verify the integrity of designs for rides and attractions – a process of logging into network devices and visually reviewing configurations. Not surprisingly, that process can eat up hours of effort, and it's not unusual for problems to be overlooked.
By utilizing Forward Networks' NQE checks for design verification, however, his team reduced the process to less than five minutes, creating massive savings in terms of labor and time. But most importantly, NQE checks enabled the team to validate circuit redundancy and identify missing links. Had the primary circuits or links failed during a live show, the redundant circuits or links would not have kicked in to keep the show running smoothly – or at all.
"It was a problem we didn't even know we had, and we weren't even looking for it," he said. "If we hadn't run these checks on NQE, any failover scenario we might have had would have been unsuccessful, causing massive segments of the show to go down. We avoided an outage that would have been impossible to calculate by preventing a spectacular customer service fail."
That experience led him to expand the use of NQE with Forward Enterprise during the company's biannual Power Redundancy Drills. During these events, the venue effectively kills the commercial power feeds to different areas of the park to ensure that UPS, battery strings, and backup diesel generators function properly. Prior to doing so, the IT team is tasked with verifying the operational state of all network devices that will be affected, including verifying device states while they're on backup power and when commercial power is restored.
Traditionally, these processes have been completely manual, requiring considerable time and personnel resources. When a device fails to come back online or enters a "hung" state, the team is forced to deploy “boots on the ground” to conduct a building-by-building, closet-by-closet hunt to visually inspect the physical devices.
"Leveraging Forward Enterprise and NQE enables us to quickly identify any network device that doesn't come back in the proper operational state within minutes," he said. "In the event that we have to direct our technicians to physically inspect a network device, we can do so with far greater precision and minimize – if not entirely eliminate – the need to hunt for a failed element. This is a game-changer for our team."
To learn more about how you can use Forward Networks to simplify network operations, schedule a demo today. Be sure to read our other blogs in this series about how Forward Networks is impacting enterprise networks around the world, including UNDER PRESSURE: Enterprise IT Teams Use NQE To Reduce Time-Intensive Processes.
When your organization is inevitably hit by a cyberattack, you want your security operations engineers to move lightning fast to identify the scope, duration, and impact of the attack, contain the disruption and prevent any costly or lasting damage. To do that, they need access to actionable information about everything that’s in your network — where devices are located, how they interact, and all the relevant details about their configuration and state.
Insight for Security Engineers
Security teams need this insight so they can isolate devices and cut off all possible pathways that attackers might travel to reach your critical assets. But do your teams have that insight at their fingertips? Or is it trapped in spreadsheets, bogged down by other time-consuming, manual processes, or simply, impossible to get to? If it’s the latter, you’re allowing attackers to have the upper hand.
Now, imagine if your security operations pros had an “easy button” they could hit whenever attackers strike, which would allow them to contain and remediate cyber threats ultra-fast? Even better, what if they could use that easy button to help ensure hosts aren’t vulnerable to attack in the first place?
No need to wonder, “What if?” This easy button exists. It’s the blast radius identification and isolation feature we recently added to the Forward Enterprise platform.
Blast Radius Identification in a Single Click
The blast radius feature uses data about your network that our platform already collects. Blast radius enables security teams — with a single mouse click — to identify the full reach of a compromised host and then isolate exposed devices swiftly.
Many of our customers had told us their security teams could benefit from having access to the same searchable, actionable information about their network topology and behavior that their network engineers use every day. That feedback inspired us to develop and deliver this brand-new feature to help security teams be even more effective in their work to protect the enterprise — especially during a crisis.
