According to Gartner’s 2023 Emerging Technologies and Trend Impact Radar, Digital Twin technology is shown as having a significant impact in the next one to three years, but what exactly does this technology do? The easiest way to think about a digital twin is Google Maps. Not only does the map provide a digital representation of the roadway, but everything along the route; all of the assets that make up the community, the various stores, gas stations, construction projects, crosswalks, schools etc.
Digital twins are commonly used in various industries, including manufacturing, engineering, healthcare, transportation, and smart cities. They enable organizations to gain insights, optimize performance, and make informed decisions about their physical assets or processes.
The benefits, such as predictive maintenance, performance optimization, scenario testing, and simulation of different operating conditions, that are gained in manufacturing and smart cities can also be gained when this technology is applied to cybersecurity. However, at this time, digital twin technology is not widely adopted within the cybersecurity sector, despite three very applicable use cases that can be addressed today.
1. Security posture management
In January 2022, a federal zero trust architecture (ZTA) strategy was introduced, “requiring agencies to meet specific cybersecurity standards and objectives by the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 in order to reinforce the Government’s defenses against increasingly sophisticated and persistent threat campaigns.”
Nothing changes behavior like a deadline. Zero trust is now broadly accepted as the security architecture of the future by enterprise and vendors alike. Recent purchases of billions of dollars in cybersecurity have been dedicated to implementing this strategy.
Despite this, do organizations really know if their zero trust architecture is performing as planned? A digital twin can help security teams validate and verify that global network security posture complies with zero trust design goals for multi-cloud and on-premises networks.
Through visualization of east-west traffic flows, endpoint-to-endpoint connectivity analysis matrices, and timely non-compliance alerts, digital twin technology helps engineers refine and prove the strength of their zero trust implementation.
Knowing which devices and applications can communicate with one another is foundational to security — yet most teams work from out-of-date spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to make this critical determination.
By correlating routing information and security policies, digital twins offer an always current network segmentation analysis. Security operations professionals gain full confidence with zone-to-zone connectivity posture.
2. Vulnerability management
As of June 2023, there are over 205,226 publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Whenever business relies on open source software components, this means that there is a steady stream of new vulnerabilities discovered every day. Even the most sophisticated organizations in the world don’t have the time or resources to sift through CVE alerts, contextualize them, and then remediate the most important ones.
With a digital twin, security teams can reduce risk by contextualizing which CVE alerts apply broadly to their network, the severity of the alert, and then proactively identifying devices with CVE vulnerabilities across the global network. The enhanced analysis helps prioritize remediation efforts by reducing the likelihood that unimpacted devices are reported as vulnerable. With this insight, security teams can prioritize remediation based on severity and configured features.
3. Attack surface management
A digital twin can provide detailed information on all devices connected to a compromised host, in a single intuitive interface. Users can localize a compromised host and analyze its network reachability in minutes, as well as quickly understand exposure in the event of a compromised host in network environments. Digital twins provide network security teams with an “easy button” that gives them searchable and actionable information about network topology through an interface that’s quick and easy to navigate, as well as easy to understand and communicate results.
Bonus reason: results
The organizations that are applying digital twin technology to their cybersecurity programs have results that speak for themselves. By creating a single source of truth, security teams are able stay in front of threats. One Fortune 50 financial institution was able to reduce ticket resolution time by 55% while the time it spent on audits dropped by 57%. A major internet service provider deploying digital twin technology saved over 700 hours/year of engineer time spent just in network change windows (almost $100,000 value), and another Fortune 50 media company reduced network outages by up to 34%, preventing millions of dollars lost due to service loss.
As networks continue to evolve and threats become more sophisticated, the use cases for digital twin technology will only continue to evolve.
