Cloud consultancy Asperitas and SDN vendor Villa-Tech have partnered to create a network digital twin for large and midsize enterprises. The fully managed service, which is available now, reduces a company’s risk and increases its pace of change by creating a virtualized clone of an on-premises network and providing a platform to simulate and implement changes.

The companies have had a partnership since 2017, and have set up, deployed and managed networks for numerous Fortune 1000 companies. The new service will provide enterprises a holistic view of their existing infrastructure with guidance on the impact of different choices and strategies. 

This is part of a larger trend around using digital twins to simulate different aspects of networks, such as Nvidia’s efforts to simulate data centers; Digital Twin Sim’s and Ericsson’s efforts to simulate different aspects of 5G networks; and Scalable Networks Technologies work to model power grid networks.

A new take on the network

Scott Wheeler, managing partner and practice lead at Asperitas, told VentureBeat, “A network digital twin is a fully managed mirrored replica of an organization’s on-premises network,” Scott Wheeler, managing partner and practice lead at Asperitas, told VentureBeat. 

Since it is a working live mirror copy of the production environment, changes to the environment can be implemented and tested without impact on the existing production environment. It includes replicas of all production network hardware and software with a simulation that allows the digital twin to scale to virtually any use case or testing requirements.

As part of the new offering, Asperitas and Villa-Tech will build a replica of an organization’s on-premises network infrastructure and virtualize each component, allowing organizations to test their network in a real-world setting. Companies can create multiple twins to explore different use cases or support use cases such as testing different networking scenarios, testing performance impacts and identifying security vulnerabilities. Companies will also be able to use the network digital twin to assess the performance of their own private infrastructure, onramps to the cloud, and connectivity to third-party services and SaaS apps. 

“The value is in the ability for customers to develop, change, and update at a much more rapid pace while knowing exactly how their production network will behave upon implementation,” Wheeler said. “Therefore, risks are removed ahead of network deployment, greatly reducing, if not eliminating, post-implementation issues.”