Digital twin technology addresses these problems: Build an accurate model of the real environment, then use it to test changes before they reach production.
For network teams, digital twin technology provides a continuously updated behavioral model built from device configuration and state data. For data center engineers, it provides a virtual replica of the physical facility where rack layouts, cooling configurations and power loads can be simulated before hardware is touched.
What a digital twin actually does
A digital twin is a virtual representation of an environment and it synchronizes with the live environment continuously, which distinguishes it from static simulations built during a project’s design phase.
For networks, that means collecting configuration and state data continuously across every device, including routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers and cloud environments. All that information is updated in the model as the infrastructure changes. Network teams query the model to evaluate the impact of a planned change, test different approaches and validate that an update accomplishes its goals before pushing it to production.
