What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation. This time out, Palmer spoke with Dave Erickson, co-founder and CEO of Forward Networks. Erickson holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. He is a contributor to the OpenFlow spec and the author of Beacon, the OpenFlow controller at the core of commercial products from Big Switch Networks, Cisco and others, and open source controllers such as Floodlight and Opendaylight (ODL). His thesis used SDN to improve virtualized data center performance. Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Erickson discussed in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video. Matt Palmer: What's Next is meant to help people think about what to do next within their infrastructure. So we have a whole slew of topics to talk about. But one of the many that I think you are uniquely qualified to talk about is the notion of a digital twin. Could you talk a little bit about that? How do you define a digital twin...there are a lot of definitions of it. And then, what is the impact, what's the need for digital twins within the enterprise today around networking and security? Dave Erickson: So, how do we define it? Digital twin is a bit of a newer term, right? I think it's only been used for the last handful of years broadly. And then, even more recently from a networking perspective. So what does it mean? At a very high level, it's taking something that you or I or the listeners here interact with on a day-to-day basis and taking it out of the real world and putting it into software where you can look at it, understand it, poke at it and potentially even make changes to it. And then see what the outcome of that is. And we interact with these all the time around us. We've been doing it for decades. They just weren't necessarily branded “digital twins.” One of the canonical examples that we like to refer to is Google Maps. If you think about Google Maps or any of the other mapping products, they have taken this copy of the physical world. They've traced all of the different roads, identified where they all go, brought that all into software, put that in our hands and on our desktops and then overlay both. That's not quite static, but not super dynamic data with very dynamic data like traffic conditions, where the hotels are, pricing, our favorite speed traps. If you use Google Maps, you know when you ought to slow down or not. And that brings a ton of value to us every single day. And so the same thing is now being brought into the domain of networking and security. And it's bringing the same types of value, right? The step function value, and by really understanding and giving you a super clear picture of what is it that you've got in your environment. And that's important, not only for networking and security people but if you think about it, you can't defend what you don't know. So step one is making a toy and understanding precisely what you have. Your viewers probably won't be surprised, but most of the folks we work with don't know exactly what they have, and the error bar of how far off they are varies. But it's a pretty commonplace challenge. When you have built up networks of thousands to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of device elements over potentially decades — including consolidations, and acquisitions of other companies...everything grows over time. So getting a firm grip on that, understanding its behavior, understanding your security posture, your reliability, your redundancy posture. All those are important. And the digital twin is enabling technology to finally help users wrap their arms around that entire set of challenges. Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.