Digital Newsletter
Each week our editor Phil Alsop rounds up the most popular articles, videos and expert opinions. We compile this into a Digital Newsletter and send it straight to your inbox every week.
Digital Magazines
We'll let you know each time a new edition of Digitalisation World is released so that you're always kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest news and press releases.
Video Magazines
The Digitalisation World Video magazine contains the latest Zoom interviews with experts in the industry.
Forward has introduced a tool called Forward Predict, designed to improve network management by modelling the potential impact of network changes before they are deployed.
It is built around a Network Digital Twin, which is a model of device behaviour across both network and application layers. This model is used to identify possible policy conflicts and to estimate how the network is likely to behave under different conditions.
Forward Predict uses this digital twin to simulate proposed changes in a controlled environment that mirrors the production network. The aim is to detect potential issues before deployment and provide analysis of likely outcomes, helping organisations assess risk in advance.
The system is intended to support:
The approach is based on the idea that production networks should not be used directly for testing changes, as this can lead to operational risk. In traditional workflows, network changes often require significant preparation, but outcomes may only become fully apparent after deployment.
Common issues associated with this traditional approach include:
Forward Predict is positioned as part of a broader direction in networking towards more automated or autonomous management systems, where network changes can be evaluated and processed with reduced manual intervention.
The development builds on the company’s earlier work on digital twin modelling and related systems aimed at more predictive, model-based network analysis.
