Digital twinning use cases strengthen with AR, VR

One often-overlooked use case for digital twins, AR and VR applies to almost every industry: infrastructure performance and automation.

Digital twins of routers, servers, storage appliances and virtual machines can serve as testing grounds to explore performance or security vulnerabilities. The same goes for testing automated processes.

For example, let’s say an organization is rolling out a new automated process for operating system updates and patch management for infrastructure devices. Network engineers can program the automation tool to roll out the update process on the twinned environment first. In this way, they can gather configuration and performance data and share that with technology operations specialists who can revise the process if it results in unforeseen impacts.

Facilities and technology professionals can also use digital twinning to model the physical environments of systems and appliances. For example, if an organization is building out its own data center, a digital twin can model power, heating and cooling systems against rack layout. Facilities professionals can use this to check for hot spots and make sure that all control panels are easily accessible Finally, organizations can use the digital twin to optimize human operational processes, such as mapping how technicians walk through the data center.

While these applications may seem futuristic, enterprise organizations are deploying them today. The infrastructure lead at a large financial services firm recently told Nemertes Research that the single most important initiative infrastructure engineers can engage in is implementing AR/VR and digital twinning in their infrastructure environments and automation testing.