Designing, testing and provisioning updates to data digital networks depends on numerous manual and error-prone processes. Digital twins are starting to play a crucial role in automating more of this process to help bring digital transformation to network infrastructure. These efforts are already driving automation for campus networks, wide area networks (WANs) and commercial wireless networks. 

The digital transformation of the network infrastructure will take place over an extended period of time. In this two-part series, we’ll be exploring how digital twins are driving network transformation. Today, we’ll look at the current state of networking and how digital twins are helping to automate the process, as well as the shortcomings that are currently being seen with the technology. 

In part 2, we’ll look at the future state of digital twins and how the technology can be used when fully developed and implemented.

About digital twins

At its heart, a digital twin is a model of any entity kept current by constant telemetry updates. In practice, multiple overlapping digital twins are often used across various aspects of the design, construction and operation of networks, their components, and the business services that run on them. 

Peyman Kazemian, cofounder of Forward Networks, argues that the original Traceroute program written by Van Jacobson in 1987 is the oldest and most used tool to understand the network. Although it neither models nor simulates the networks, it does help to understand the behavior of the network by sending a representative packet through the network and observing the path it takes. 

Later, other network simulation tools were developed, such as OPNET (1986), NetSim (2005), and GNS3 (2008), that can simulate a network by running the same code as the genuine network devices. 

“These kinds of solutions are useful in operating networks because they give you a lab environment to try out new ideas and changes to your network,” Kazemian said. 

Teresa Tung, cloud first chief technologist at Accenture, said that the open systems interconnection (OSI) conceptual model provides the foundation for describing networking capabilities along with separation of concerns. 

This approach can help to focus on different layers of simulation and modeling. For example, a use case may focus on RF models at the physical layer, through to the packet and event-level within the network layer, the quality of service (QoS) and mean opinion score (MoS) measures in the presentation and application layers.

Modeling: The interoperability issue

Today, network digital twins typically only help model and automate pockets of a network isolated by function, vendors or types of users. 

The most common use case for digital twins is testing and optimizing network equipment configurations. However, because there are differences in how equipment vendors implement networking standards, this can lead to subtle variances in routing behavior, said Ernest Lefner, chief product officer at Gluware.

Lefner said the challenge for everyone attempting to build a digital twin is that they must have detailed knowledge of every vendor, feature, and configuration and  customization in their network. This can vary by device, hardware type, or software release version. 

Some network equipment providers, like Extreme Networks, let network engineers build a network that automatically synchronizes the configuration and state of that provider’s specific equipment. 

Today, Extreme’s product supports only the capability to streamline staging, validation and deployment of Extreme switches and access points. The digital twin feature doesn’t currently support the SD-WAN customer on-premises equipment or routers. In the future, Extreme plans to add support for testing configurations, OS upgrades and troubleshooting problems.

Other network vendor offerings like Cisco DNA, Juniper Networks Mist and HPE Aruba Netconductor make it easier to capture network configurations and evaluate the impact of changes, but only for their own equipment. 

“They are allowing you to stand up or test your configuration, but without specifically replicating the entire environment,” said Mike Toussaint, senior director analyst at Gartner.

You can test a specific configuration, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will allow you to understand if a configuration is optimal, suboptimal or broken. But they have not automated the creation and calibration of a digital twin environment to the same degree as Extreme. 

Virtual labs and digital twins vs. physical testing

Until digital twins are widely adopted, most network engineers use virtual labs like GNS3 to model physical equipment and assess the functionality of configuration settings. This tool is widely used to train network engineers and to model network configurations. 

Many larger enterprises physically test new equipment at the World Wide Technology Advanced Test Center. The firm has a partnership with most major equipment vendors to provide virtual access for assessing the performance of genuine physical hardware at their facility in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Network equipment vendors are adding digital twin-like capabilities to their equipment. Juniper Networks’ recent Mist acquisition automatically captures and models different properties of the network that informs AI and machine optimizations. Similarly, Cisco’s network controller serves as an intermediary between business and network infrastructure. 

Balaji Venkatraman, VP of product management, DNA, Cisco, said what distinguishes a digital twin from early modeling and simulation tools is that it provides a digital replica of the network and is updated by live telemetry data from the network.

“With the introduction of network controllers, we have a centralized view of at least the telemetry data to make digital twins a reality,” Venkatraman said. 

However, network engineering practices will need to evolve their practices and cultures to take advantage of digital twins as part of their workflows. Gartner’s Toussaint told VentureBeat that most network engineering teams still create static network architecture diagrams in Visio. 

And when it comes to rolling out new equipment, they either test it in a live environment with physical equipment or “do the cowboy thing and test it in production and hope it does not fail,” he said. 

Even though network digital twins are starting to virtualize some of this testing workload, Toussaint said physically testing the performance of cutting-edge networking hardware that includes specialized ASICs, FPGAs, and TPUs chips will remain critical for some time. 

Culture shift required

Eventually, Toussaint expects networking teams to adopt the same devops practices that helped accelerate software development, testing and deployment processes. Digital twins will let teams create and manage development and test network sandboxes as code that mimics the behavior of the live deployment environment. 

But the cultural shift won’t be easy for most organizations.

“Network teams tend to want to go in and make changes, and they have never really adopted the devops methodologies,” Toussaint said.

They tend to keep track of configuration settings on text files or maps drawn in Visio, which only provide a static representation of the live network. 

“There have not really been the tools to do this in real time,” he said.

Getting a network map has been a very time-intensive manual process that network engineers hate, so they want to avoid doing it more than once. As a result, these maps seldom get updated. 

Toussaint sees digital twins as an intermediate step as the industry uses more AI and ML to automate more aspects of network provisioning and management. Business managers are likely to be more enthused by more flexible and adaptable networks that keep pace with new business ideas than a dynamically updated map. 

But in the interim, network digital twins will help teams visualize and build trust in their recommendations as these technologies improve.

“In another five or 10 years, when networks become fully automated, then digital twins become another tool, but not necessarily something that is a must-have,” Toussaint said.

Toussaint said these early network digital twins are suitable for vetting configurations, but have been limited in their ability to grapple with more complex issues. He said he likes to consider it to be analogous to how we might use Google Maps as a kind of digital twin of our trip to work, which is good at predicting different routes under current traffic conditions. But it will not tell you about the effect of a trip on your tires or the impact of wind on the aerodynamics of your car. 

This is the first of a two-part series. In part 2, we’ll outline the future of digital twins and how organizations are finding solutions to the issues outlined here.

Security at the speed of cyber: What is CISA’s Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01?

The Biden Administration is continuing efforts to adopt new cybersecurity protocols in the face of ongoing attacks that threaten to disrupt critical public services, infringe on citizen data privacy and compromise national security.

On November 3, 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a directive for federal agencies and contractors who manage hardware or software on an agency’s behalf to fix nearly 300 known cyber vulnerabilities that malicious actors can use to infiltrate and damage federal information systems. These known exploited vulnerabilities fall into two categories, each with a deadline for remediation:

• 90 vulnerabilities that were discovered in 2021 must be remediated by November 17

• About 200 security vulnerabilities that were first identified between 2017 and 2020 must be remediated by May 3, 2022

As part of the directive, CISA also created a catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities that carry “significant risk” and outlined requirements for agencies to fix them. The catalog includes software and configurations supplied by software providers like SolarWinds and Kaseya, and large tech companies like Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

Improving the nation’s cybersecurity defenses continues to be a top priority as the country has experienced an unprecedented year of cyberattacks. Malicious actors are continuing to target remote systems and prey on known vulnerabilities as the pandemic continues, leading to public service disruptions in telecommunications and utilities.

This directive comes just shy of six months since President Biden issued his Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, which aims to modernize cybersecurity defenses by protecting federal networks, strengthen information-sharing on cyber issues, and strengthen the United States’ ability to quickly respond to incidents when they occur.

While the Biden Administration and many federal agency heads agree that these actions are necessary to Boost cybersecurity protocols — they can be extraordinarily difficult to implement without the right tools.

In the next section, we will explore how federal agencies and their security teams can gain visibility across distributed environments to remediate vulnerabilities outlined in the directive.

Gaining visibility into federated IT environments

While most federal agencies are headquartered in Washington, D.C., field offices and agency staff are spread across the country, using many different endpoints (laptops, desktops, and servers) to access federal networks. This distributed IT environment can make it difficult for CISOs and their security teams to gain visibility into their agency’s environment in real time.

To comply with CISA’s BOD 22-01, security teams first need to gain visibility across federated IT environments and be able to answer a few basic questions, including:

• How many endpoints are on the network?

• Are these endpoints managed or unmanaged?

• Do any known exploited vulnerabilities cataloged in the

  directive exist in our environment? If so, do we currently have

  the tools to patch them quickly and at scale?

• Do we have the capability to confirm whether deployed

  patches were applied correctly?

While these questions may seem straightforward, they often take agencies weeks or months to answer due to a highly federated

IT environment and the nature of IT management, which often includes tool sprawl and conflicting data sets — which is at odds with the aggressive timelines outlined in the directive.

With Tanium, CISOs and their security teams can discover previously unseen or unmanaged endpoints connected to federal networks, and then search for all applicable Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) listed in the directive in minutes. With Tanium, it only takes a single agent on the endpoint to obtain compliance information, push patches and update software. Tanium provides a “single pane of glass” view to help align teams and prevent them from spending time gathering outdated endpoint data from various sources.

As CISA has committed to maintaining the catalog and alerting agencies of updates for awareness and action, having a unified endpoint management platform that provides visibility across an organization gives CISOs and their teams the tools they need to scan and patch future vulnerabilities at scale.

In the next section, we will explore how federal agencies and their security teams can prioritize actions and deploy patches to meet deadlines outlined in the directive.

Prioritizing actions and patching known vulnerabilities quickly

Once agency heads and their security teams have a clear picture of the state of their endpoints, the next step is to pinpoint known vulnerabilities and fix them fast based on associated deadlines in the directive.

With Tanium, federal agencies can search for the specific vulnerabilities listed in the directive and then patch those vulnerabilities in minutes, while having the confidence that patches were applied correctly. As a single lightweight agent, Tanium doesn’t weigh down the network. Remediation typically takes less than a day if an agency is already using Tanium. Existing customers should reference this step-by-step technical guidance on how to address the vulnerabilities laid out in the directive.

In addition to fixing known vulnerabilities, the directive also outlines other actions federal agencies must take, including:

Reviewing and updating internal vulnerability management procedures within 60 days.
At a minimum, agency policies must:

• Pave the way for automation around a single source of truth with high-fidelity data and remediate vulnerabilities that CISA identifies within a set timeline

• Assign roles and responsibilities for executing agency actions to align teams around a single source of truth

• Define necessary actions required to enable prompt responses • Establish internal validation and enforcement procedures to ensure adherence to the directive

• Set internal tracking and reporting requirements to evaluate adherence to the directive and provide reporting to
CISA, as needed

Reporting on the status of vulnerabilities listed in the catalog.

• Agencies are expected to automate data exchanges and report their respective directive implementation status through the CDM Federal Dashboard

As new threats and vulnerabilities are discovered, CISA will update the catalog of known vulnerabilities and alert agencies of updates for awareness and action.

Many federal agencies already use Tanium to provide visibility and maintain compliance across their distributed IT environment. Federal agencies can count on Tanium to be a valuable tool in discovering, patching and remediating future known critical vulnerabilities.

Tanium in action: scanning distributed networks and remediating at scale

While CISA has previously imposed cybersecurity mandates on federal agencies to immediately fix a critical software problem, this new directive is notable for its sheer scope and respective deadlines. Leveraging Tanium, federal agencies and contractors who manage hardware or software on an agency’s behalf can patch known critical vulnerabilities and comply with the deadlines in a fraction of the time.

The Tanium platform unifies security and IT operations teams using a “single pane of glass” approach of critical endpoint data, so that federal agencies can make informed decisions and act with lightning speed to minimize disruptions to mission-critical operations.

With Tanium, you can get rapid answers, real-time visibility and quickly take action when addressing current vulnerabilities in BOD 22-01. As CISA adds more vulnerabilities to the catalog, you can have confidence that Tanium is constantly checking for compliance and patching your endpoints quickly across your environment.

To learn more about how Tanium can help your agency remediate known vulnerabilities outlined in the CISA directive, visit Tanium.com/cisa

In this guest blog, Chris Darvill, solutions engineering vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at cloud-native API platform provider Kong, sets out why the humble API should not be overlooked when organisations are looking to make their IT setups more sustainable

Within the next 10 years, it’s predicted that 21% of all the energy consumed in the world will be by IT. Our mandates to digitally transform mean we’re patting ourselves on the back celebrating new ways we delight our customers, fuelled by electricity guzzled from things our planet can’t afford to give.

Addressing this isn’t about the steps we take at home to be a good citizen, such as recycling and turning off appliances when not in use.  This is about the way we architect our systems.

Consider that Cisco estimates that global web traffic in 2021 exceeded 2.8 zettabytes. That equates to 21 trillion MP3 songs, or 2,658 songs for every single person on the planet. It’s almost 3 times the number of stars in the observable universe.

Now consider that 83% of this traffic is through APIs. While better APIs can’t alone Boost energy consumption (no one thing can), they do have the potential to make a big difference, which is why we need to be making technical and architectural decisions with this in mind.

Building better APIs isn’t just good for the planet and our consciences; it’s good for our business too. The more we can architect to reduce energy consumption, the more we can reduce our costs as well as our impact.

To reduce the energy consumption of our APIs, we must ensure they are as efficient as possible.

This means eliminating unnecessary processing, minimising their infrastructure footprint, and monitoring and governing their consumption so we aren’t left with API sprawl leaking energy usage all over the place.

At Cisco, we’re delivering solutions that expand access to education, enhance student experience, Boost engagement, and ignite innovation. With our broad portfolio and unmatched experience in networking, security, cloud, and collaboration, we’re creating a world where learning never stops. Join us in reimagining education.

At Cisco Meraki, we create intuitive technologies to optimize IT experiences, secure locations, and seamlessly connect people, places, and things. We love to push boundaries, experiment, and make IT easier, faster, and smarter for our customers. By doing this, we hope to connect passionate people to their mission by simplifying the digital workplace.

Founded in 2006, and acquired by Cisco in 2012, Meraki has grown to become an IT industry leader, with over 600,000 customers and 9 million network devices online around the world. Our cloud-based platform brings together data-powered products including, wireless, switching, security and SD-WAN, smart cameras, and sensors, open APIs and a broad partner ecosystem, and cloud-first operations.

As technology continues to take a larger role in corporate sustainability practices, CIOs can play a key role in driving both business value and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. 

In fact, creating and implementing a comprehensive sustainable technology strategy must now be the core mission of a purpose-driven CIO.

Every executive in Accenture’s recent sustainable technology survey agreed that technology is critical for achieving sustainability goals. So why have only seven per cent of businesses fully integrated their technology and sustainability strategies?

In part, it’s because this will require a fundamental shift to a business model that will affect the role of the CIO, who may not even be aware that their expertise is needed to address these challenges. 

Delivering on the promise of sustainable technology will require CIOs to take a seat at the sustainability table, where they must work in close collaboration with other executives to identify the technologies that will help their company achieve its ESG goals.

Despite how critically intertwined these goals are with technology investments and operations, less than half (49 per cent) of CIOs are included in their corporate leadership team’s decision-making processes around sustainability objectives and plans. 

Without CIOs being involved in these core responsibilities, ESG targets suffer — which is particularly concerning when considering companies that take the lead on ESG issues outperform their competition financially, generating up to 2.6 times more value for shareholders than their peers.

Why are some companies slow to action?

Given how important sustainability metrics are to companies and their stakeholders, it is crucial to identify why it is taking so long for some organisations to jump on board with new technological innovations to implement meaningful change.

Research has uncovered the following challenges:

• Perceived lack of readiness and expertise: 40 per cent of executives surveyed believe that the right solutions are not available or not mature enough, including availability of the right talent to lead these initiatives. 
• Complexity and challenges with implementation: 33 per cent of executives surveyed are struggling with the complexity of solutions or with modernising their legacy systems to be more sustainable. 
• Awareness and understanding of impact: 20 per cent of executives surveyed are not aware of the unintended consequences of technology or whether the technology they use is sustainable. 

Examining these hurdles more closely, Accenture developed a Sustainable Technology Index, which ranks performance against the three elements on a scale of 0-1.