An IDC Business Value Study has concluded that Forward Networks’ customers reap significant financial and operational benefits from its advanced digital twin technology. Among several critical findings, IDC’s research has determined that the average Forward customer gains $14.2 million in benefits annually, derived from measurable improvements to network stability and reliability ($7.7M), team productivity ($2.9M), and additional operational efficiencies ($3.6M).
Networks are becoming increasingly complex, critical, and costly to maintain. Ensuring reliable network service levels and integrity, while also accommodating rapid growth in traffic, connections, endpoint exchanges, threat mitigation, and digital innovation presents major challenges for organizations of all sizes and across all regions and industries. As a result, IT departments need data-driven solutions that provide actionable, prioritized insights and drive ROI.
According to the IDC Business Value Study, “Forward Networks represents the new generation of network management solution providers that leverage detailed intelligence, deep insights, and directed automation to strengthen the resiliency and responsiveness of the network infrastructure.”
To develop this study, IDC spoke with Forward Networks’ customers who leverage its digital twin technology to manage, administer, and track their IT networks. The research focused on network administration, incident response and troubleshooting, regulatory compliance, and associated staff efficiency. IDC also researched Forward’s effect on network stability and business enablement.
IDC found that the average Forward customer gains 95.8 full-time equivalents (FTEs), which translates to $6.7M, from increased productivity made possible by reduced unplanned downtime and faster remediation.
“After talking with customers, studying and analyzing the data, and calculating the quantifiable evidence, the study proved that Forward Networks’ digital twin technology provides enterprises with significant gains in cost savings and operational efficiencies that not only improve the bottom line but also network resilience, responsiveness, and compliance,” Mark Leary, Research Director for Network Analytics and Automation, IDC, said.
Additional key findings include:
Study participants shared numerous benefits gained by implementing Forward, including efficiency and accuracy of budgeting and licensing efforts, security and risk benefits, and a more stable and reliable network environment associated with improved visibility and MTTR.
According to one of Forward’s financial technology customers, “The most significant IT-related benefit is that Forward Networks reduces the cost of gathering network data. What would take an engineer hours, days, or even longer is now accomplished with Forward Networks within minutes, while the quality of the data is also superior. This ability to gather data improved our documentation effort. With Forward Networks we know what we’re doing or what’s going on.”
A financial services organization said, “Our organization fully embedded Forward Networks into its comprehensive software updating strategy. There are approximately 20,000 devices in our network. We’ve developed software that automates updates for these devices. Forward Networks plays a key role in delivering the data on what devices can be updated simultaneously. This is all done automatically and saves our organization weeks of planning each year.”
Forward Enterprise generates a vendor-neutral software abstraction (digital twin) that models the entire network infrastructure, including switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, and SD-WAN solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud. Whether the network consists of tens of devices or hundreds of thousands of devices, Forward Enterprise scales to model it all. Move from reactive to proactive with real network modeling.
With available REST APIs, it easily integrates into new and existing network and security management workflows. Pre-built integrations with common platforms like ServiceNow, Slack, Ansible, Itential, Rapid 7, Tenable, and others allow for seamless merging with IT systems of record.
Forward Enterprise helps Fortune 500 businesses and large government agencies with the following use cases:
Forward Enterprise offers network, security, cloud engineers, and operators the following features: