FORWARD NETWORKS

Digital Twin (mathematical model) for large complex enterprise networks

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:

  • Members of the Incident Response and Troubleshooting team increased their efficiency by 34.2%. This represents a staff time gain of 35.8 FTE valued at $2.5M.
  • IT team members completed network deployments 71% faster, identified and resolved network-related problems 44% faster, and planned, designed, and tested within network environments 36% faster. 
  • Compliance teams were 10.4% more efficient, translating to a benefit of 4 FTEs. 
  • With a better understanding of their network environment and its components, customers experienced 33% fewer downtime incidents, and if an incident occurred, it was resolved 55% faster.
  • Productivity loss caused by unplanned downtime per organization was reduced from 216,240 hours to 36,045 hours, saving the average organization 180,195 hours of productivity annually.
  • Organizations attributed another $1.25M annually in productivity gains after implementing Forward’s technology.

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.”

Description

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:

  • Inventory management
  • Outage prevention
  • Change window management/Config change validation
  • Automated compliance and audit
  • End-to-end path analysis
  • Accelerated troubleshooting and root cause isolation 
  • Mathematically accurate security posture analysis
  • Prioritized vulnerability assessments
  • Incident response and remediation
Features

Forward Enterprise offers network, security, cloud engineers, and operators the following features:

  • Search: search network behavior, configuration, and state network-wide with an intuitive and powerful interface. Find any device in the network, including its connections and all forwarding behavior for fast root-cause isolation and incident remediation. Perform complete end-to-end path analyses across the network for both on-prem and multi-cloud infrastructure (support for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform). Generative AI enables natural language searches for faster results and low learning curve. 
  • Verify: verify that the network is configured and behaving exactly as intended across on-prem, cloud, and virtual overlay networks. Set, verify, and customize policies for the entire network. Continuously audit the network and receive timely, actionable non-compliance alerts.
  • Security: enhance the network’s security posture with automated security posture connectivity analysis, attack surface management analysis, both for network devices and compromised hosts, enhanced automated vulnerability analysis, and cloud security verification.
  • Behavior Diffs: side-by-side comparison in one quick view of configuration file and state changes for any device, between any points in time. Identify what policy rules and behavior checks have changed between snapshots. Quickly see new device connections, topology changes, and interface updates. Learn how routes are altered due to changes with the ability to filter results by VRF, next-hop address, IP destination, and more.
  • Network Query Engine (NQE): query the network like a database. NQE provides access to normalized structured data across all the supported vendors in a scalable, easy, maintainable way. It allows engineers to define and perform custom verification checks.
  • Predict: understand the outcome of network configuration changes for ACL and NAT environments. Proactively identify potential connectivity and security policy violations before the changes are applied to the production network. 
  • Dashboard: gather insights on the network complexity, the health of the network, and on the improvements made by the team to make the network healthier. Forward Dashboard helps establish targets and set goals that aim at improving the overall network reliability, correctness, and hygiene, on a regular basis. Users can customize the dashboard based on their individual priorities. 
  • AI Assist: a groundbreaking generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature integrated on top of NQE. Empowers NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps professionals to gain comprehensive insights and expedite solutions for their most demanding network challenges through natural language searches.