Digital Twins are a Living and Breathing Network Diagram

Visibility into network intent is a growing problem for NetOps teams. Learn how digital twins create a living and breathing network diagram with network change preparation, troubleshooting, and compliance benefits that result in more confidence and increased implementation speed.

Andrew Froehlich, President & Lead Network Architect, West Gate Networks

February 3, 2023

1 Min Read
Joshua Sortino via Unsplash

Understanding and verifying network intent is growing increasingly complex thanks to multi-cloud architectures and layer upon layer of virtualization. To get a better handle on how network traffic flows from one system to another -- and to anticipate changes to traffic behavior when adds/changes are made -- a digital twin network enables this functionality with advanced capabilities that keep NetOps teams up to date on how changes to the network can alter application data flows.

Today, most NetOps teams use a combination of static physical and logical network diagrams along with knowledge acquired and retained by working with a network over time. Problems occur, however, when diagrams are not properly maintained or when NetOps staff leave the organization or move on to different roles.

While tools can be used that create automated network diagrams, they often lack the level of intelligence and granularity required to detail traffic flow patterns when changes are made. This is especially true in more complex network architectures that use hybrid or multi-cloud networks and distribute multiple services across several servers in the same or different data centers.

Read the Full Article on Network Computing

About the Author(s)

Andrew Froehlich

President & Lead Network Architect, West Gate Networks

Andrew has well over a decade of enterprise networking under his belt through his consulting practice, which specializes in enterprise network architectures and datacenter build-outs and prior experience at organizations such as State Farm Insurance, United Airlines and the University of Chicago Medical Center. Having lived and worked in South East Asia for nearly three years, Andrew possesses a unique international business and technology perspective. When he's not consulting, Andrew enjoys writing technical blogs and is the author of two Cisco certification study guides published by Sybex.

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