Why a Network Digital Twin Is the Missing Piece for AI-Era Operations
Network World, Monday, September 28th, 2026
As AI agents start making network changes, a mathematical digital twin is needed to predict the impact of a change before it reaches production.
Network engineers still often test changes in production, which becomes a serious liability once AI agents propose and execute changes, and the gap between design intent and reality leads teams to defer patches and firewall updates.
Drawing on a Forward Networks e-book, the analysis separates emulation-based twins from deterministic mathematical models that compute every possible forwarding path, and separates both from observability.
Cited data shows edge-device exploits rising from 3% to 22% of breaches, only 54% of network vulnerabilities remediated each year, and outages costing more than $500,000 per hour.