Forward Networks Presents at AI Infrastructure Field Day

AI is reshaping network operations with Forward Networks

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Networks are more critical than ever, yet their operational models have remained largely unchanged for decades, relying on manual CLIs, spreadsheets, and often outdated diagrams. This traditional approach struggles to keep pace with the rapid evolution of applications, end users, and adversaries, resulting in extremely high operational workloads due to the sheer complexity of modern networking. Enterprise networks are being fundamentally reshaped by AI, cloud, and data-intensive workloads, requiring reliable, high-performance, and secure infrastructure. While companies have increased visibility into network packets and application performance, these methods cannot answer foundational questions about network inventory, connectivity, security posture, compliance, or whether network behavior aligns with its intended design, akin to reactively treating symptoms in medicine without full diagnostic imaging.

Forward Networks addresses this challenge by pioneering a shift from reactive symptom measurement to a proactive, comprehensive understanding of the network, analogous to full-body imaging scans in medicine. Twelve years ago, the company developed a mathematically accurate digital twin of the network, building on PhD research that broke down complex network behaviors into mathematical primitives. This mathematical underpinning enables the creation of provable assurances for critical aspects such as compliance, security, reliability, and availability. The digital twin is built by exhaustively collecting configuration and protocol state data from every packet-moving device across on-premise infrastructure (switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN) and cloud environments (AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM), along with security vulnerability data, performance metrics, and contextual business data. This rigorous modeling even accounts for potential device behaviors under varying conditions and firmware changes through extensive testing.

This centralized, mathematically sound digital twin provides instant, accurate answers to a wide range of questions, from inventory and connectivity to security properties, compliance, and the impact of changes. It facilitates a major operational shift by eliminating the “toil” of manual data extraction and cross-referencing, enabling network, security, and compliance teams to collaborate around a single source of truth. Forward Networks clients reportedly experience over $14 million in annual ROI and significantly improved operational confidence. Building on this robust foundation, the company has now introduced Forward AI, a conversational interface that enables users to ask complex questions in plain English and receive trusted answers, making network knowledge effortless. This innovation leverages the digital twin’s “ground truth” to support safe, trusted, and agentic operations, human-supervised, fundamentally transforming how organizations interact with and manage their critical networks.

Personnel: David Erickson

Introducing Forward AI, chat with your network, with Forward Networks

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Forward Networks’ foundational technology is a “digital twin of the network,” which serves as a behavioral source of truth. This software platform connects to all network devices, collecting configuration and state data to build a behaviorally accurate model. It transforms raw, vendor-specific data into a queryable, vendor-independent model, analyzes all possible network behaviors, and proactively traces every conceivable packet path to determine delivery, drops, and the underlying causes. This capability goes beyond mere monitoring by enabling the network’s properties to be provably validated, including connectivity readiness and security isolation between regions. The platform collects extensive multi-vendor, multi-protocol data at scale, including tens of thousands of devices, and organizes it into a hierarchical stack of raw, normalized, behavioral, and contextual data to enable deep insights.

The company identified an “operational gap” in which network and security teams struggle to translate their goals into actionable information from disparate sources and to manage complex, multi-step workflows. Envisioning “agentic operations” where AI assists with routine tasks, Forward Networks emphasizes the critical need for robust data and trustworthy AI outputs. To address this, they introduce Forward AI, a conversational agentic system powered by the network digital twin. Forward AI provides a plain English interface, allowing operators to ask questions about devices, hosts, subnets, packet paths, and vulnerabilities, effectively bridging the gap between human intent and the complex underlying network data. While designed with agentic capabilities, the initial focus is on enabling users to gain trusted insights necessary for informed actions.

Personnel: Nikhil Handigol